The battle against those who violate copyright is escalating: a UK court has ordered the country's internet service providers (ISPs) to block the Pirate Bay website for copyright violations, using technology originally intended to block child pornography sites.

Pirate Bay serves as a search engine for torrents: peer-to-peer filesharing links often used to share copyrighted content including films and music – but also widely used for legal and legitimate filesharing. The site does not itself host copyright content.

It's a ban that would be problematic, even if it were likely to be effective: the ruling places the costs and inconvenience of punishment not on the people who are violating copyright but on ISPs, in the form of enforcement costs, and people sharing legitimate content through torrents who can no longer easily reach a UK audience – not to mention internet users who now face online censorship.

One of the central problems, however, is that a simple ban is unlikely to work. It is easy for site operators – or virtually any volunteer, for that matter – to recreate the Pirate Bay site at any other web address. The WikiLeaks site, when facing similar blocks and heavy traffic, was eventually replicated in full by more than 1,800 volunteers. Keeping Pirate Bay blocked, and thus complying with the court order, will require substantial and sustained effort from the ISPs – a near impossible task.

Even this would not suffice: users could use anonymisation software such as Tor to bypass simple blocks, or simply switch to one of several other well-known sites offering similar services (even if not quite so extensive).

An effective block would require cutting off the channels used by torrents entirely, using a tool that inspects each bit of internet traffic known as deep packet inspection. To make the block certain, this would also have to be used to block services such as Tor. In other words, to cut out even one high-profile filesharing website would quickly require apparatus as sophisticated as the great firewall of China.

Such is the cost of trying to enforce laws that are virtually unenforceable in the internet era. In a bid to keep the system of copyright intact, ever more drastic measures are needed – either in terms of the scale of the censorship technology needed, or in terms of the collateral damage.

The Richard O'Dwyer extradition case is another example of the same phenomenon. O'Dwyer set up a site, tvshack.net, which served as a search engine for people to find TV programmes to watch online – often without the consent of the copyright owners. Despite not hosting or grabbing any of the programmes himself, and the CPS not pressing charges against him, O'Dwyer is being sought for extradition by US authorities, where he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

As the law becomes more difficult to enforce, severe deterrent sentences and widespread technological crackdowns become necessary to hold the edifice in place. Even measures far less draconian than those needed to actually prevent this form of filesharing have significant side effects: a Guardian article, for example, was blocked by Facebook's technology aimed at minimising links to such sites. Our article mentioning Richard O'Dwyer was blocked for including "tvshack.net", despite the site being in US government hands for 18 months, and the Guardian not actually linking to the site.

This is not to suggest copyright law is necessarily bad or immoral. Journalists rely on our creative output to make a living, in much the same way as musicians and filmmakers do. However, it's unclear how enforceable copyright is even for us: rival publications regularly take huge swaths of articles, including quotes gathered over several weeks, and run a very similar story with minimal attribution. Spam blogs often run whole articles word for word. This is an irritant, but far from the greatest threat to the profession.

But the current crackdown against copyright violators is unsustainable. Current efforts either seek to block off enough of the internet so as to make illegal filesharing impossible, or to give filesharers punishments so severe that others are deterred. Both approaches cause too much damage and lack public support, as the huge public backlash against Sopa and Pipa should herald.

Copyright cannot be allowed to be treated as a more fundamental right than free expression, or a more important issue than a free and open internet.

If it is to be maintained in the internet era, new means of enforcement must be found. The question is whether any reasonable measure can work – or whether industry and government are fighting a futile rearguard action.

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