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A court in The Hague has ruled that ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay and that the Pirate Party has to stop publishing not only instructions on how to circumvent those blocks, but links to instructions, as well.
The Pirate Party is a political party devoted to universal, unrestricted access to the Internet. Freedom of information is core to their mission. TPB (The Pirate Bay), the world’s biggest file-sharing site, holds a treasure trove of torrent links to pirated movies, music and TV shows, as well as original music released and promoted exclusively on TPB.
The Dutch court on My 10 ruled that Internet providers UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort must all catch up with the country’s ISP giants, Ziggo and XS4ALL, in blocking user access to TPB. Ziggo and XS4ALL were ordered to block TPB in January.
Virgin Media, a UK ISP, also blocked users from accessing TPB last week. Or at least it tried to. TPB claimed it actually logged 12 million more visitors than ever, thanks to attention drawn by coverage from major news outlets.
TPB itself seemed amused by the Virgin Media block, taking advantage of the media spotlight to offer tutorials on getting around such censorship. Anonymous, for its part, unleashed its wrath on Virgin Media, carrying out a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on virginmedia.com.
TPB, in turn, denounced the DDoS and recommended that the incensed attackers put their time to better use by contacting politicians, posting flyers, coming up with more proxies or calling home to tell their mothers that they love them.
For its part, the Dutch branch of the Pirate Party had also been providing instructions on how to get around the blocks.
The recent ruling by the court in the Hague is an attempt to quash all that censorship-avoidance education. It comes following a complaint by the anti-piracy group Brein, a trade association that represents the Dutch recording industry and movie studios. Brein, which is analogous to the United States’ Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) trade groups, stands to profit from any fines levied against ISPs or groups such as the Pirate Party, since the verdict stipulates that fines be directed to the trade association.
The Dutch Pirate Party is inviting donations to help it pay a ¬10.000 fine that will be levied if it doesn’t manage to root out all of its links to The Pirate Bay-dedicated proxies.
It well might need the money, given that the Dutch Pirate Party isn’t entirely sure what the ban covers.
The court order instructs the Pirate Party “to cease and desist placing lists with Internet addresses which can be used to circumvent the block of TPB, on her subdomain tpb.piratenpartij.nl,” according to the group’s site.
The group said that it will have to “comb every inch” of the site, including its blog, to ensure they remove all such links that could get them into hot water.
The Pirate Party is still studying the verdict, but at this point, it believes that the ban includes directing people to the Tor project’s download page or to the Opera browser’s page. Both Tor and Opera provide ways to avoid network surveillance: Tor is an open network that helps to protect users from network surveillance via traffic analysis, and Opera offers Private Browsing Mode.
In short, all direct links to reverse proxies are apparently now forbidden and the site has been forbidden from holding any information or links to information about circumventing The Pirate Bay block.
The group doesn’t rule out testing the ban and risking the fine. “If we would want to try and risk ¬10,000, we could try and see what exactly is meant by direct links,'” the Pirate Party said on its site.
In the meantime, the Pirate Party equates the censure with an insult to freedom and a step closer to an Internet that’s pockmarked by holes where censored information once lived.
“This is a slap in the face for the free Internet and a novel judicial decision,” the group said. “The judge decided to give the Netherlands another nudge on the gliding scale of censorship. More and more bits of the Internet will have to be censored because they might be used to get access to infringing sites, until eventually most of the Internet will be unreachable.”