The Bergamo court of law in Italy ruled that The Pirate Bay (TPB) is off-limits to anyone living in the country – all 60+million people, according to a 2009 estimate. Basically the court decided that because TPB linked to torrents that infringe copyrighted material, the site’s DNS and all current and future IP-addresses must be banned. The Bergamo court of law made this ruling last week; Italian ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have already started to enforce the TPB block.
As you can imagine, the millions of Italian Internauts were less than pleased with the court’s decision. They described the ruling as outrageous; some went as far as to say Italy is the “new China.” You know, because censorship is the norm in the People’s Republic of China. You cannot even access popular site IMDb (Internet Movie Database) over there for example, because the site is blocked by the Great Firewall of China.
SPONSORED LINKS
It is the Mininova story all over again. After Mininova went legit, traffic to the site plummeted. But this did not affect the piracy rate as torrent fans simply moved on to other torrent sites. The TPB blockade in Italy is somewhat similar. Users have simply moved on to other sites.
BTjunkie for example prides itself on being “the largest and most advanced BitTorrent search engine.” According to TorrentFreak, the number of Italian users on the site grew considerably after the TPB blockade. “The owner of BTjunkie has informed TorrentFreak that he has seen a huge jump in traffic from Italians after the blockade was enforced. His site today received 50% more Italian visitors compared to a week ago, indicating that Italian Pirate Bay users are not planning to stop using BitTorrent,” commented TorrentFreak's Editor-in-Chief.
If you live in Italy and cannot give up on The Pirate Bay, there is one simple alternative: you can sign up for a free or a paid VPN service. Thanks to a VPN service you exchange the IP you get from your ISP to an anonymous IP address. As a true TPB fan, you could sign up for TPB’s own VPN service, IPREDATOR.
The Bergamo court of law in Italy ruled that The Pirate Bay (TPB) is off-limits to anyone living in the country – all 60+million people, 