Torrent sites have always been under the scrutiny of anti-piracy, pro-copyright groups, and popular torrent site The Pirate Bay is no stranger to this. Italy in particular has no love for the Swedish torrent site. Last month we reported that the Bergamo court of law in Italy ruled that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have to block access to the torrent site, thus leaving internet users in Italy without access to The Pirate Bay (TPB). The court imposed this ban on TPB because TPB linked to torrents that infringe copyrighted material.
As you can imagine, computer users migrated to other torrent sites. At the time BTjunkie, site that describes itself as the “largest and most advanced BitTorrent search engine”, said it saw a 50% increase of Italian visitors. For those that could not leave TPB behind and move on to other torrent sites, alternatives sprung up – for example the Labaia.net site that offers proxy access to The Pirate Bay.
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Strike that - site that offered proxy access to TPB. Labaia.net is no longer up and running. This is because the Guardia di Finanza, Italian police force that deals with cybercrime, took it down. When trying to access Labaia.net, users are presented with a warning message (see image at the bottom). When trying to access The Pirate Bay, users from Italy are presented with a timeout.
When the Bergamo court of law imposed the TPB ban, it said that ISPs must prevent users from accessing TPB’s DNS and all current and future IP-addresses. Since Labaia.net is connected with the original TBP IP address, access to it should have been banned – but the authorities did not do this, they seized the site altogether.
When contacted by TorrentFreak, site that focuses on everything torrent-related, the operator of Labaia said he never received any kind of notification to shut down the site. The operator said that had he received any kind of warning, he would have closed Labaia.net down. Instead of a warning, the police just showed up, took all the hardware and copies of the entire site and logs. Apparently running a proxy site is a crime in Italy.
Torrent sites have always been under the scrutiny of anti-piracy, pro-copyright groups, and popular torrent site The Pirate Bay is no stranger to this. Italy in particular has no love for the Swedish torrent site. 
