<nettime> Fwd: IFPI Forces Danish ISP to Block The Pirate Bay

["Alex Foti" <alex.foti@gmail.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: nikolaj heltoft <nikolaj.heltoft@gmail.com>
Date: 2008/2/4
Subject: IFPI Forces Danish ISP to Block The Pirate Bay
To: Alex Foti <alex.foti@gmail.com>


IFPI Forces Danish ISP to Block The Pirate Bay Written by Ernesto on
February 04, 2008


The battle between the IFPI and the Pirate Bay continues. A Danish
court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP "Tele2?$B!m
(DMT2-Tele2) to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker.
The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited
sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures.


The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy
organization that represents the recording industry - and plans to
force other ISPs to do the same. However, The Pirate Bay is determined
to fight back, as usual.

The Pirate Bay team has already asked other BitTorrent admins to stand
up against the IFPI lobby, and arranged a meeting with Tele2 to
discuss the current events. Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told
TorrentFreak in a response: "I hope the torrent community understands
what this will do to Danish people. It will also act as a very bad
precedent for the European Union, and I hope everybody will fight
this."

At the moment, The Pirate Bay team is registering new (Danish)
domains, to make sure people can still download .torrent files from
the Bay when the ban is activated later today tomorrow. In addition
the Pirate Bay will launch a campaign website, together with the
Danish pro-piracy lobby "Piratgruppen".

Sebastian Gjerding, spokesperson for Piratgruppen, a pro-piracy lobby
whose goals are to reform current copyright law and protect consumers'
rights, is not pleased with the news. He told TorrentFreak: "The
verdict is absurd. It will block access for danish users to the worlds
largest distributor of culture and knowledge - copyrighted or not.
It's true that you can access copyrighted material through The Pirate
Bay, as you can with Google or Rapidshare. Should they be blocked as
well?"

"It's very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with
something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides
what information the people can access and what should be censored. In
Denmark its apparently the record industry," Sebastian adds.

This is not the first time a Danish ISP has been ordered to censor the
Internet. In December 2006 A Danish court ruled against Tele2 in a
similar case, and ordered the ISP to block all access to Allofmp3.com.
According to the ruling, the ISP was willingly infringing copyright if
their customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

IFPI has announced it will continue it's battle against BitTorrent
sites in Europe. Last month they tried to convince European lawmakers
that ISPs should block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay, and
block filesharing protocols, no matter what they're being used for.
Luckily, these proposals were rejected.

We will follow this campaign, and the response from Denmark closely.

Stay tunes for updates!


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