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Web-blocking application back in courts in Ireland

By | Published on Friday 31 May 2013

The Pirate Bay

Efforts by the major music companies to force internet service providers in Ireland to block access to The Pirate Bay were back in court this week.

As previously reported, the majors began legal action seeking injunctions to force UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb, Three and Telefonica O2 Ireland to stop their customers from accessing the always controversial file-sharing site late last year, citing a new bit of Irish copyright law introduced in February 2012.

The judge hearing the case last December urged all parties to reach a voluntary agreement on the matter, though that never seemed especially likely. While one of the country’s biggest ISPs, Eircom, is already voluntarily blocking TPB, it seemed unlikely its competitors, and especially UPC, would do so without a court order.

Though when, with no such voluntary agreement reached, the music majors took their application for an injunction back to court this week, none of the net firms raised strong objections to the suggestion they should block the Bay, though UPC has queried the effectiveness of any such web-blocking and the possible impact on web users’ rights.

According to the Irish Times, Judge Brian McGovern said he would now consider submissions from all parties and make a ruling as soon as possible.

Of course all such web-blocks are pretty easy to circumvent if you want to. In the UK access to The Pirate Bay is already blocked via court order, and last week new blocks were instigated against Movie2K and Download4All after action by the film industry. But one guy who has set up proxies to help users get round any blockades told Radio 1 that such moves by the music and movie industries were pointless.

He told the BBC station: “In such an interconnected world, blocking and censoring websites is a wasteful venture. There are so many workarounds available that it makes me wonder what the point is of such a block in the first place. The proxy sites I have set up make it much easier to bypass these blocks. And setting up a proxy site is really simple as well. Hundreds of people around the world have set up proxy sites for The Pirate Bay alone”.

Of course the rights owning companies would likely argue that, while of course it’s easy to circumvent web-blocks if you want to, the existence of the blockades helps educate users about which sites infringe copyright and which are legit and legal to use.



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