Pirate Bay: ‘Australian anti-piracy laws won’t work’

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has suggested that the Australian Federal government’s crackdown on online piracy, which includes new laws to block overseas websites that infringe copyright, will be unsuccessful in curbing illegal downloading.

Speaking to ABC, Sunde said that loopholes in the measures mean that the actions of people using VPNs to access torrent providers are not covered by the Bill and that alternative methods of accessing the conenmt would be sought. “For instance, in Denmark just a few minutes away from here, they tried to block Pirate Bay. What happened is that people found very easy ways to circumvent the block, and the traffic from those countries to Pirate Bay spiked afterwards,” he noted.

“People aren’t stupid and there’s really easy alternatives to circumvent most of these legislations. So it becomes a kind of whack-a-mole game, and like a nuclear arms race as well, because you will have to block the next thing that will help people to circumvent things.”

The bill – designed to allow TV and movie rights holders, among other types of rights holders, to ask a judge to block access to websites, or “online locations”, that have the “primary purpose” of facilitating copyright infringement – passed the House of Representatives on June 16 with Labor’s support and is expected to go before the Senate week commencing June 23, where it will also pass with Labor’s support.