05 June 2012

Another British Provider Censors The Pirate Bay

Sky Broadband became just another Internet service provider to follow the move of Virgin Media and Everything Everywhere and block access to The Pirate Bay.

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Broadband providers were supposedly provided a time limit to comply with the High Court’s ruling this past April to deny access to the largest BitTorrent tracker, because it massively infringed copyright. Sky Broadband decided to act faster and set a deadline on the 1st of June. Meanwhile, O2 and TalkTalk announced that they were still working on a system to censor The Pirate Bay. As for BT, it is expected to comply within two weeks.

ISP’s official website informs that they have invested billions of pounds in high-quality entertainment for its subscribers and therefore must protect such investment. Sky claims that such protection ensures that the subscribers still benefit from TV shows, films and music both now and in the future. This involves taking effective action against Internet piracy and copyright violation.

Besides, Sky had also to block access to Newzbin2 last December after receiving a court order to do so. Nevertheless, pirates in the United Kingdom and Holland must not despair, because The Pirate Bay had also taken measures to bypass the censorship measures. For instance, the tracker put in place new IP addresses a few days ago. After this, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN requested that the broadband providers should block the new IP address without a court order, but was refused. This means that BREIN must now seek to obtain court orders again, while the BitTorrent tracker is ready with a set of hundreds of available IP addresses. However, Sky Broadband might have to start worrying or taking anti-DDoS measures, because Virgin Media recently became the target of such attacks on its website.

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