File-sharing site The Pirate Bay is no longer available through the .sx top-level domain of the partly-Dutch island of Saint Martin.

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According to Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN, the Netherlands' equivalent of the RIAA, the .sx registry decided to ban The Pirate Bay after repeated requests from the group.

Meanwhile, the file-sharing site has relocated to a new address on the Ascension Island's .ac domain.

Early last year, a court in the Hague ruled, at BREIN's request, that the country's ISPs must block their customers' access to The Pirate Bay, ostensibly rendering the website inaccessible in the Netherlands.

According to BREIN, The Pirate Bay is continuously trying to avoid such blocks by repeatedly moving to a different domain — which is why it ended up as a .sx site in the first place.

Compulsory filtering

However, the Dutch block may have the opposite effect to the one it intended. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Tilburg late last year discovered that the number of downloads from The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands rose after the ban took effect.

In addition, the ban has not yet been permanent, as two major Dutch ISPs — XS4ALL and Ziggo — have appealed against the court's ruling, claiming that compulsory filtering is unlawful.

Although BREIN says it's confident that the court will rule in its favour, the verdict in a 2011 case against Belgian ISP Tiscali/Scarlet could leave room for another conclusion.

After Belgian copyright protection organisation Sabam brought a case against the ISP in an effort to force it to install a filter preventing the illegal exchange of copyrighted files, the European Court of Justice ruled that national courts may not force ISPs to filter content, because such a move would be in violation of both the European Parliament's 2000 e-commerce directive and fundamental constitutional rights.

Dutch court will rule on the case involving XS4ALL and Ziggo on 17 December.

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