Various courts around the world have come to the conclusion that The Pirate Bay is a copyright-infringing website.
Various courts around the world have come to the conclusion that The Pirate Bay is a copyright-infringing website.As a result, Internet providers in dozens of countries are required to block access to the site. This works well, but blocking measures are also quite easy to circumvent.
Some people may resort to VPN services, for example, or replace the default DNS resolver provided by their ISP with independent alternatives. Dedicated ‘proxy’ sites have also become quite popular.
These proxies act as a copy of The Pirate Bay, making the site accessible through an alternative domain name. These platforms are thorns in the sides of rightsholders, who fight back by adding proxy site domains to existing blocking orders targeting The Pirate Bay.
This cat-and-mouse game inspired the development of sites that provide an overview of working Pirate Bay proxy sites. ‘The Proxy Bay’ is just one of many similar examples.
Police Take proxybay.github.io Offline
The Proxy Bay has been operating in the ‘proxy information’ niche for many years. Aside from its main domain name, it also uses a proxybay.github.io version, which is linked to the Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub. This variant has also been available for years, but last month found itself abruptly pulled offline.
The takedown was requested by City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). On behalf of music group BPI, PIPCU sent a takedown request to GitHub, alerting it to the alleged criminal activity taking place on its domain.
“This site is in breach of UK law, namely Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud,” PIPCU wrote.
“Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert,” the notice added.
DMCA Counternotice
GitHub honored the takedown request and proxybay.github.io was redirected to a 404 error. However, The Proxy Bay operator clearly disagreed with this decision and responded with a formal DMCA counternotice.
“The person claiming DMCA doesn’t understand, that there is no content hosted on proxybay.github.com hence why it is wrong to send a DMCA request for it,” the site owner wrote.
“There are no content/media of any kind hosted on proxybay.github.com, if there is – again ask mister DMCA robot to provide with exact links of media files which were infringed and I will be glad to remove them from repository.”
That ‘mister DMCA robot’ was none other than the UK police didn’t seem to impress The Proxy Bay operator. Since there are no links to copyrighted content, the domain should be reinstated, they argued.
The legality of these sites can be debated. In the UK, thepirateproxybay.com and similar sites have been added to court-sanctioned blocklists in the past, making this a tricky situation when blended with DMCA notices relevant under United States law.
GitHub Restores The Proxy Bay
Despite the sensitivities, the DMCA counternotice was successful and this week GitHub decided to restore the domain and the site. As a result, proxybay.github.io is available once again to the public at large.
The reinstatement doesn’t mean that GitHub has taken sides. The DMCA simply dictates that disputed content has to be restored between 10 and 14 business days, unless the rightsholder takes legal action.
Apparently, no legal action was taken in this case, so the logical response was to reenable the domain name.
Interestingly, GitHub had an easy out if it wanted to keep The Proxy Bay offline. The counternotice listed the wrong domain name, as it referred to proxybay.github.com instead of proxybay.github.io. This .com domain doesn’t exist, which could render the DMCA takedown protest moot.
