If there’s one site that has felt the wrath of Internet censorship the most, it’s The Pirate Bay. The popular BitTorrent site is currently censored in Ireland, Italy, Turkey and Denmark, and almost lost its domain name to the U.S. Government last year.
If it’s up to a group of Finnish Music Industry representatives, Finland will be the next country to join this growing list. Yesterday, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the local IFPI branch announced that they have filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.
The legal action targets Elisa, one of the largest ISPs in Finland, and demands that the Internet provider stops allowing its subscribers to access The Pirate Bay. The BitTorrent site is hugely popular in Finland where it’s listed as the 31st most-visited website according to traffic reports.
According to the music industry there’s no other viable option to stop the mass-scale copyright infringement other than to censor The Pirate Bay.
“We’ve waited and hoped that the Pirate Bay’s admins would cease the service in November 2010, after the criminal conviction at the Swedish Appeal Court,” said music producer representative Lauri Rechardt in a comment. “That did not happen, on the contrary, the number of Finnish users increased instead.”
“The development of a legitimate online market in Finland will not be successful if illegal services such as the Pirate Bay can continue to operate,” Rechardt added.
The President of the Finnish Musicians’ Union Ahti Vänttinen further stressed the need for effective legislative tools to crack down on ‘rogue’ websites.
“It is somewhat tragicomic that, although the illegal activities of Pirate Bay’s founders have been sentenced to imprisonment, the site is still operational in Finland,” Vänttinen said. “Unless this is addressed in Finnish legislation, credibility is at stake. Or is the Internet outside the law?”
Thus far several lawsuits throughout Europe have resulted in a Pirate Bay blockade, but not all.
A Dutch court ruled last year that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don’t have block customer access to The Pirate Bay. According to the court, there was no evidence that the majority of the ISPs’ users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.
But the tide is changing to the benefit of the entertainments industries, and increasingly lawmakers are warming up to broader censorship tools. In Europe there are talks to adopt a China-like firewall to block websites deemed ‘inappropriate,’ and in the US blocking ‘illicit’ websites will be simplified if the PROTECT IP Act is passed.
Although The Pirate Bay team has weathered worse storms, they are worried about said proposals and told its users earlier this month that “The Battle of Internets is About to Begin.”
