The Pirate Bay gets court-ordered ISP block in Ireland

The Pirate Bay has been hit with yet another blow after an Irish court has ordered six internet service providers in the country to block access to The Pirate Bay. The court order was sparked by complaints from four music labels that the file-sharing website was hosting copyrighted content.

The music labels claim that ISPs were allowing around 200,000 people per month, or 8% of Ireland’s internet users, to access The Pirate Bay in order to illegally download copyrighted content, such as music. Digiweb, Hutchison 3G Ltd, Imagine, Telefonica O2 Ireland Ltd, UPC, and Vodaphone were all named in the complaint, while Eircom has voluntarily blocked access to The Pirate Bay.

Justice Brian McGovern said Wednesday that new copyright laws in Ireland and the European Union allowed the blocking of illegal file-sharing sites by court order. Furthermore, the four music labels, which include EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner Music, won’t have to file new lawsuits in order to block The Pirate Bay if the site creates new URLs or tries to avoid the blocks.

Naturally, the internet service providers didn’t agree with the court as far as blocking users to The Pirate Bay, and instead raised issues about over-blocking websites and accidentally blocking websites that didn’t contain illegal content, which could cause a ruckus with a lot of internet subscribers.

The court-ordered block is expected to completed within the next 30 days. As far as this affecting The Pirate Bay’s traffic, they’re probably not too worried about it, since Ireland makes up just a small number of users compared to the rest of the world, but any lost users is certainly not a good sign for any service.

SOURCE: Irish Times