Ah, The Pirate Bay… Ce nom résonne comme une douce mélodie à mes oreilles. Depuis sa création en 2003, ce site emblématique a connu bien des tempêtes, mais tel un navire insubmersible, il continue de voguer fièrement sur les flots du BitTorrent .

Pour vous rafraichir la mémoire, en 2003, Facebook n’était même pas encore une lueur dans les yeux de Mark Zuckerberg, YouTube n’existait pas, et les smartphones, une lointaine chimère ! Même Korben.info n’était pas là ! Et à l’époque, pour regarder un film, il fallait soit acheter un DVD pour les plus fortunés, soit se prendre une carte chez Vidéo Futur. Hé oui pas de streaming à l’époque !

Et aujourd’hui, c’est un anniversaire un peu particulier que The Pirate Bay fête : les 20 ans du plus ancien torrent encore actif sur le site !

Il s’agit d’un épisode de la série « High Chaparral « , uploadé le 25 mars 2004, qui a donc traversé deux décennies, et qui est toujours partagé par plusieurs seeders dévoués, prêts à perpétuer son existence envers et contre tout. Au fil des années, ce torrent est même devenu un véritable symbole pour la communauté de The Pirate Bay.

Bien sûr, d’autres torrents anciens subsistent, comme une copie piratée du documentaire « Revolution OS » ou le célèbre « The Fanimatrix « . Mais cet épisode de « High Chaparral » détient quand même la palme de la longévité, du haut de ses 20 printemps.

Alors oui, on ne sait pas ce que nous réserve l’avenir mais une chose est sûre, The Pirate Bay et ses irréductibles pirates continueront de naviguer, bravant les tempêtes juridiques et autres assauts des ayants droits assoiffés de thunes.

Allez, rendez-vous dans 10 ans pour fêter les 30 ans de « High Chaparral » !

Source

When pirated copies of “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” came out nearly two decades ago, The Pirate Bay changed its front page logo.

The Pirate Bay became the “Grand Theft Bay,” illustrating the deviant stance upon which the site built its reputation since the year of its launch .

The GTA-inspired logo was the first of many ‘doodles’ that separated the ‘most resilient torrent site’ from its competition. Instead of hiding from law enforcement or big media’s anti-piracy groups, The Pirate Bay often went on the offensive, facing all challenges head-on.

Many believed it was revolutionary, while others thought it was naive. What’s clear, however, is that The Pirate Bay fulfilled an unmet source of demand.

Pirating Pioneers

At the time, it was nearly impossible for people to consume media online. Music streaming services simply didn’t exist yet, games were sold wrapped in plastic, and Netflix had yet to start its streaming business. Meanwhile, everything was available on The Pirate Bay, for free.

Times have changed but even the most staunch pro-copyright advocates can’t deny that piracy helped to lead the entertainment industries to new business models. Without the Napsters , Limewires and Pirate Bays of the time, media consumption wouldn’t have evolved so swiftly.

There is no award for this accomplishment, however. On the contrary, the public faces of The Pirate Bay’s founding crew all served prison sentences. Hollywood never managed to bring the site completely to its knees, but did make its founding fathers pay with life’s most precious asset: TIME .

Intriguingly, The Pirate Bay story itself now serves as inspiration for a TV production. B-Reel Films started working on a Pirate Bay TV series for Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT a few years ago

None of the Pirate Bay founders are closely involved in the TV project, and they’re certainly not being compensated either. Instead, the producers used interviews with other people involved, plus the vast amount of public information available on the Internet.

Filming Finished

The new Pirate Bay series is scheduled to be released on Swedish television later this year. It has just finished filming and the first images, as well as the leading characters, were recently revealed to the public.

The production took place in Stockholm, Sweden, but also ventured to other countries including Chile and Thailand, where Fredrik Neij was arrested and paraded in front of the press in 2014.

Time will tell how the producers and director have decided to tell this story; there are many rabbit holes to pursue after all. Director Jens Sjögren describes it as a thriller, albeit one with humor.

“The Pirate Bay is a character-driven thriller told with great heart, warmth, nerve, will, and humor that takes us from a basement in the suburbs to fancy offices in Hollywood. A story about how a spark in a student corridor takes off and risks setting fire to the entire establishment far away in Hollywood,” Sjögren says.

Global Release Uncertain

With millions of former and current users of the torrent site, there will likely be some interest in the series from an international audience too. Thus far, no deals have been announced and, at this point, it’s uncertain if the series will be available outside of Sweden this fall.

Dynamic Television has acquired the global distribution rights to the series. Speaking with TorrentFreak, publicist Marylou Johnston says that the series is now going post-production so it is “way too early” to report any international sales.

“International sales will start when we can show the series to potential buyers. I doubt we will have a global release but it could happen,” Johnston notes.

Needless to say, selling a TV series to Hollywood, one that documents the history of its arch-enemy, is an intriguing proposition. While film insiders are smart enough to recognize potential when they see it, there’s a certain barrier to overcome.

You Can’t Stop Pirates?

Ironically, if The Pirate Bay series isn’t made available globally, people might be incentivized to download a copy from The Pirate Bay instead. That would show that, despite being declared illegal a long time ago, the site still fills demand today.

If anything, The Pirate Bay’s history has shown that it’s impossible to stop people from pirating. The people involved are not oblivious to this fact either. However, it’s no different from all other productions they’re working on and Johnston doesn’t expect that piracy will hurt sales.

“We can never guarantee that some ‘pirate’ version is not going to circulate but that applies to every show! Thankfully it doesn’t affect sales,” she explains

There are ways to minimize piracy, of course. A worldwide premiere on a streaming service, for example. If people can watch the series legally on a service they already subscribe to, there’s less incentive to go to The Pirate Bay; sentiment aside.

While this sounds simple; making it happen isn’t easy.

Global releases are still a rarity today for content owned by a third party, which typically sells it to the highest bidder. These negotiations take time and, in some cases, the offers simply aren’t good enough.

In theory, a globally operating streaming service could pick the show up, either this year or after its Swedish premiere.

It would be truly revolutionary if all streaming services licensed the show at the same time, making it available everywhere and to everyone; Pirate Bay style. That utopian vision is probably a bit naive though.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Pirate Bay and search engines are not a happy marriage recently. On the contrary.

For example, we previously reported on Google’s decision to remove thepiratebay.org from its search results in countries where ISPs are required to block the site.

Searching for The Pirate Bay

This type of deindexing is not unique to Google. As highlighted in the past, Bing has effectively wiped all Pirate Bay URLs from its index until only the main homepage was left. That move sunsequently forced DuckDuckGo and other Microsoft-powered search engines to do the same.

Today, there are still some more exotic search engines that are capable of finding Pirate Bay links easily, including non-infringing ones. However, Russia’s Yandex can be scrapped from that list.

Founded in 1997, Yandex is one of the oldest search engines on the web. The service is used around the world but is particularly popular in Russia where it has a majority market share.

It’s known that Russia requires search engines, including foreign ones, to remove results linked to pirate sites . This also applies to Yandex, but these measures don’t typically expand globally.

Today, it’s not hard to find most popular pirate sites on Yandex internationally. This applies to YTS, Fmoviesz, Aniwave, and even the Russian torrent site Rutor. For some reason, however, The Pirate Bay’s official domain appears to have vanished.

The Pirate Bay Vanished

A basic search for “The Pirate Bay” brings up plenty of results but these link to proxies, the Wikipedia page, and other related entries. In the locations we searched from, however, thepiratebay.org is nowhere to be found.

Finding the official domain isn’t rocket science as it’s mentioned on the Wikipedia page that’s linked in the information panel on the right. However, a ‘site: search’, that typically lists all pages from a specified domain name, returns no results at all in our tests.

Interestingly, the same site-specific command does return plenty of links for other pirate sites, so The Pirate Bay appears to be in a league of its own.

Update: After finishing this article the site: search started to show some results for thepiratebay.org again in our tests. It’s still not featured in any of the top results for “ The Pirate Bay “. It’s possible that Yandex changed something and the outcome may also depend on people’s location, so results may vary.

Why Yandex has taken this decision is unknown. We requested a comment from the company, hoping to get an explanation, but that inquiry remains unanswered.

At this point, The Pirate Bay probably no longer cares about yet another ‘blocking’ effort. The site’s traffic has been hurt by similar measures over the past years, but plenty of loyal users still manage to find their way to it.

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Note: For those who are wondering; China’s top search engine Baidu can no longer find Thepiratebay.org either.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Two years ago, Google started delisting the URLs of several popular pirate sites from its search results.

This decision didn’t impact all users. Instead, Google voluntarily decided to remove URLs in countries where the sites are blocked by local Internet providers, typically following a court order.

In the Netherlands, for example, The Pirate Bay and many of its mirrors and proxies were delisted by Google in response to a notice sent by local anti-piracy group BREIN. Google took similar action in the UK, France, and other countries, once it was notified by rightsholders.

Knowledge Panels

These interventions don’t stop at simply removing the domains from the search index. Initially, we noticed that the so-called “ knowledge panels ” for the blocked pirate sites were gone too. Apparently, these were also considered problematic.

The image below shows the panel currently shown in countries where The Pirate Bay isn’t blocked. Aside from some basic details, this includes a direct and uncensored link to The Pirate Bay’s homepage.

Showing this knowledge panel in blocked regions wouldn’t make much sense after Google carefully stripped all thepiratebay.org URLs from its search results. In this context, removing the panel entirely seems a logical decision.

URL Disappears

However, when doing some recent searches, we noticed The Pirate Bay’s knowledge panel reappearing in blocked regions such as the UK and the Netherlands. As can be seen below, the official site doesn’t appear anywhere in search results, which has been the case for some time.

Here, the link to thepiratebay.org has now been stripped from the knowledge panel, something we hadn’t seen before.

Whether these interventions will do much to stop people from finding The Pirate Bay is doubtful. Wikipedia remains one of the top search results and the online encyclopedia continues to list the site’s official URL, at least for now.

Bard Refuses to Provide The Pirate Bay’s URL

To check how consistent Google is across its services, we also tried Bard, the company’s AI chatbot . That didn’t get us very far, however, with the AI pointing out that The Pirate Bay facilitates ‘illegal’ activity.

“Please note that The Pirate Bay is a website that facilitates the sharing of copyrighted material, which is illegal in many jurisdictions. As such, I cannot provide you with direct links to the website or instructions on how to find it.

“I would encourage you to seek out legal and ethical ways to acquire the content you are looking for,” Bard notes.

When we phrased the question differently, asking Bard how one can access The Pirate Bay, it offered more concrete suggestions on how to find blocked websites (even though we didn’t mention ‘blocking’). One piece of advice was to use a search engine; this works indeed, unless it’s Google.

“One way to find blocked websites is to use a search engine. There are many different search engines available, so you will need to do some research to find one that is right for you. It is important to choose a search engine that is reputable and has a good track record of privacy and security.

“Another way to find blocked websites is to use a social media site. Many social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have groups and forums that are dedicated to sharing blocked websites,” Bard added.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

During the summer of 2003, Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån was making a name for itself; sharing news and educating people on how they could share media online.

What the group’s members didn’t realize at the time, is that the plans they made would create a ripple effect that still has an impact decades later.

Like many other people mesmerized by the unbridled ability to share files over the Internet, the new BitTorrent protocol caught Piratbyrån’s eye. From one thing came another, and Piratbyrån decided to start their own tracker.

A Swedish Torrent Tracker

When this idea was first brought up isn’t clear, not even to the site’s founders, but at the end of 2003 The Pirate Bay was presented to the public.

“We have opened a BitTorrent tracker – The Pirate Bay. From there, you can download and share games, movies, discs, TV shows and more,” the short announcement reads , translated from Swedish.

One of the group’s unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån. The pro-culture group saw sharing as something positive instead, and a file-sharing website would surely bring this point across.

The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

This early setup was quite primitive, as shown here , and some of the hardware was later put on display at the Computer Museum in Linköping.

Piratbyrån initially planned to create the first public file-sharing network in Sweden but, in the years that followed, the site grew out to become a global file-sharing icon.

While The Pirate Bay team was proud of this success, it was not without consequences. Initially, various takedown messages from copyright holders were met with mocking responses, but the legal pressure became a heavy burden.

Behind the scenes, the US Government applied pressure on Sweden , urging the country do something about the taunting pirate site. At the same time, the site’s founders noticed that they were being shadowed by private investigators, who smelled blood.

The Raid

The pressure eventually reached its first peak when The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure was raided.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The policemen had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers, and that’s exactly what they did.

For most pirate sites the road would end there, but The Pirate Bay was no ordinary site, and it wasn’t planning to cave in just yet.

Shortly before the raid began, Gottfrid noticed some unusual activity. He warned Fredrik who, as a precaution, decided to make a backup. This turned out to be a pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

Instead of hiding in the shadows, Pirate Bay’s spokesperson Peter Sunde, aka Brokep, told the world that The Pirate Bay wasn’t going anywhere.

This swift and defiant comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The site made headline news around the world and in Stockholm, people were waving pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.

The Turning Point

There was also a major downside, however. The raid was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a spectacular trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s founders.

This became another turning point. Many of the early Piratbyrån members cut their ties with the site. Gottfrid, Fredrik and Peter also left the ship, which was handed over to a more anonymous group ostensibly located in the Seychelles.

The outspokenness of the early years eventually gave way to the silent treatment. While the site’s moderators are easy to reach nowadays, the people (Winston) who pull the strings at the top remain behind the scenes at all times.

This was made quite obvious when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm datacenter in 2014 . At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.

The Pirate Bay eventually recovered from this second raid too, but by then something had clearly changed. The torrent site now seems content with just being there.

Over the years the site simplified its setup by removing the tracker, introducing magnet links , and further decentralizing its setup. The ability to comment was also sacrificed at some point, and user registrations were closed for years, although there’s some progress on that front now.

The Mods and Admins

Today’s manual user registrations are processed by a dedicated moderator team, which also ensures that the site remains free of spam and malware. This team of volunteers is separate from the site’s ‘operator’ and many have been in that role for over a decade.

Earlier today, Pirate Bay admin Spud17 posted a message in the Pirate Bay forum to celebrate the 20th anniversary.

“Most of the current TPB Crew have been here for well over 10 years, many for much, much longer, and we’re proud to be associated with the world’s most iconic torrent site,” she notes.

“We volunteer our time freely to help keep the site clean, nuking the fakes and malware to kingdom come, and help edit/move/delete torrents as and when uploaders request help in the forum’s Account Issues subforum.”

Crypto Miner and Token

After two decades, TPB still manages to make headlines on occasion. For example, when yet another country orders Internet providers to block the site, or when it suddenly decides to ‘deploy’ its users to mine cryptocurrency .

The last major project was announced in 2021 when The Pirate Bay released its very own ‘crypto’ token out of the blue. There was no official whitepaper for these PirateTokens, but the torrent site envisioned the ‘coin’ being used to access VIP content or donate to uploaders.

These plans never came to fruition and the token price soon entered a freefall . After a few months, the official token announcement disappeared from the site as well, leaving token holders with worthless digital memorabilia.

The Pirate Bay itself isn’t going anywhere it seems. The events listed above are really just a fraction of events spanning 20 extraordinary years. The question now is whether the site will survive until its 25th anniversary.

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Note: The 20-year anniversary logo was created by theSEMAR.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

When The Pirate Bay launched nearly 20 years ago, its main goal was to become a bastion of free and uncensored information.

The site categorically rejects takedown requests from copyright holders and allows anyone to upload almost anything.

Since its early days, The Pirate Bay has always been free to use and open to the public at large. Those who wanted to share files only had to register an account, which was easy enough.

Registrations Closed to Stop Spam

The last sentence is in the past tense, as user registrations were effectively disabled four years ago . The last ‘new’ user was added to the torrent site on May 22, 2019, and, after that, there were no signs that registrations would reopen anytime soon.

The TPB team initially said that registrations had been closed to stop floods of malware torrents. This type of abuse was a major problem for the site’s moderators who asked the main operator to temporarily disable registrations.

The plan was to address the problem by putting a limit on the number of torrents users could upload in a given timeframe. That would prevent hundreds of spam torrents from being uploaded at once, so TPB could accept new users again and continue business as usual.

This temporary fix stayed in place for four years but this week, registrations were opened once again. The recent closure of ‘rival’ torrent site RARBG played a major role in this development.

RARBG’s demise took out a major supplier of new torrents . There are currently only a few public torrent sites where users can register, so the TPB moderators were concerned that a generation of potential uploaders would be lost.

Manually Approved Registrations

The team shared their concerns with TPB operator “Winston” who came up with a solution that was officially deployed a few hours ago.

New Pirate Bay registrations are not completely automated. TPB administrator Spud17 informs TorrentFreak that new users must apply for an account at the official SuprBay forums, where moderators will manually create accounts using a new tool.

This hands-on approach will help to prevent scammers and spammers from flooding the site. Users will be able to register directly in future but all accounts will still have to be approved before they are activated.

“For those who have waited years to upload, they now have the chance to get an account,” Spud17 says, pointing to the SuprBay thread .

“Whether they want to upload niche stuff every now and again, or be one of the next big scene uploaders – all are welcome. Except for the nitwits who flood the site with crap, but we’ll just nuke their arses.”

Limited # Uploads

The Pirate Bay has shown signs of deterioration in recent years. In addition to closed registrations, the comment sections under each torrent have been disabled for years and are not expected to come back anytime soon.

Whether new users will trigger an inflow of more content has yet to be seen. New accounts are limited to 50 uploads per day but those who plan to be more active than that can request an exception.

“Should anyone have designs on becoming a prolific scene uploader, you can request the limit be lifted once your account is established,” Spud17 writes.

After years of legal trouble, it appears that The Pirate Bay has entered calmer waters. There haven’t been any prolonged outages like we have seen in the past. That said, the site will always remain a top target for law enforcement and rightsholders, so a sudden storm is not unthinkable.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT inspired Microsoft to add more AI features to its Bing search engine.

The idea is that this will allow users to receive more elaborate answers compared to an ordinary list of links.

Whether this strategy will pay off has yet to be seen, but in our tests, something else stood out. People are not the only ones asking questions. Bing itself is quite interested to hear what its users think too.

Bing’s Pirate Bay Poll

As expected, a regular keyword search for “Pirate Bay” returns a lot of information about the site. In addition to the correct URL, which was previously absent , Bing also lists an intriguing poll. Specifically, it wants to know how people effectively protect themselves while using The Pirate Bay.

Bing provides its users with four options to choose from, including the use of a VPN, a proxy, the Tor browser, or a dedicated IP address. Depending on one’s definition of ‘safe’ a VPN is the most obvious answer, which is also reflected in the results .

This poll has little to do with ChatGPT of course but it is possible that Bing somehow uses the results to improve its general search functionality. Or perhaps these questions are generated by AI?

As a small experiment, we decided to ask Bing the same question it asked us ( What is the most effective way to protect yourself while using The Pirate Bay? ). And indeed, a VPN does up as the answer in a massive font.

Torrent Clients, Fmovies, RARBG, and The Dark Web

User polls aren’t exclusive to The Pirate Bay. There are several other file-sharing and piracy-related topics where other polls appear. When we type BitTorrent, for example, we’re asked about our favorite torrent client.

The options are rather limited but with 57%, uTorrent is the clear winner, followed by qBitTorrent with nearly a quarter of the votes.

When we search for Fmovies, one of the most popular pirate streaming sites, Bing suddenly wants to know what movie genres we watch most often on the site. Here, ‘action’ is the public’s favorite with nearly half of the votes.

Meanwhile, RARBG’s demise has yet to be reflected in Bing’s data. The search engine mentions a copycat site as the top result and still asks whether people think that a VPN is necessary to access RARBG.

Finally, there’s also a poll about the dark web, but perhaps it’s best if we don’t mention that explicitly.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

With torrent sites dominating the high seas of piracy in 2006, Bulgarian authorities decided to arrest Eliyan Geshev, administrator of the the country’s most popular tracker, ArenaBG.

Public uproar in Bulgaria was significant but just a day later, Geshev was a free man once again. After police provided zero evidence of any crimes being committed, a court found no grounds for Geshev’s initial arrest. Reporters who attempted to interview Geshev as he left court suddenly found themselves attacked by security guards.

In advance of Geshev being detained, the government had promised to “show no mercy” when targeting pirate site operators. In the wake of his release, Bulgarian authorities charged with tackling organized crime ordered ISPs to block ArenaBG.

Three ISPs said they would comply, others refused after declaring site-blocking “illegal.”

Site-Blocking Returns 15 Years Later

At the time, ArenaBG was hosted in the U.S. so in theory could’ve been handled there. In the end that wasn’t necessary as the blocking instructions against ArenaBG were withdrawn. In other EU countries, site-blocking plans were quietly gaining traction and would continue to do so.

Neighboring Greece approved blocking measures in 2012. Progress was dampened three years later due to constitutional concerns but today, Greece is a fully-fledged member of the EU site-blocking club, alongside its latest recruit: Bulgaria.

A decision handed down May 31, 2023 at the Sofia City Court requires three Bulgarian internet service providers to block two major torrent platforms. The names of the ISPs are unhelpfully redacted in court documents, but not so the names of the sites. Somewhat predictably, The Pirate Bay makes yet another appearance in a site-blocking action, along with Zamunda, the most popular torrent site in Bulgaria.

Recording Industry Behind The Action

The initial claim was filed in February 2020 by the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP) with support from IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Court documents reveal that the claimants requested a dynamic injunction against the main domains of The Pirate Bay and Zamunda, plus any other domains, sub-domains, mirror and proxy sites that may facilitate access to the sites in future.

Based on claims that over 90% of the sound recordings indexed by the sites are protected by copyright and shared illegally by Bulgarian BitTorrent users, BAMP and IFPI referenced the CJEU ruling in the BREIN/ Ziggo case ( C-610/15 ). The CJEU found that ISPs in Member States can be ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay, even though the site itself stores no infringing content.

In respect of the three unnamed ISPs, the claimants said that since they’re intermediaries whose services are used by third parties to infringe copyright, under Article 8, paragraph 3 of Directive 2001/29/EC the following applies:

Member States shall ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right

In written responses filed by two of the three ISPs, BAMP and IFPI’s claims were bluntly described as “inadmissible.”

Bulgarian ISPs Fight Back

One of the ISPs, identified only as ‘N.1’ in court documents, described the claim as unfounded and inadmissible, adding that it “opposes the active legitimization of the plaintiff.” The ISP also pointed out that Bulgarian law does not recognize a claim “for blocking access to Internet sites.” As for EU law requiring Member States to ensure access to injunction applications, that would not apply here because Bulgaria hadn’t yet transposed that into national law.

Pushing back further still, the ISP disputed allegations that it enables subscribers to commit copyright infringement on the torrent sites, so therefore disputes that its subscribers use the sites to download pirated content using BitTorrent. In summary, the ISP asked for the claim to be rendered inadmissible or possibly rejected as unfounded.

The ISP identified as ‘F.1’ used the words ‘inadmissible’ and ‘baseless’ to describe the claim. The ISP said that the claim was filed for the “termination of a violation” but since the claim failed to provide any details in respect of the ISP, conducting an effective defense would be difficult. In common with ‘N.1’, the ISP ‘F.1′ asked for the claim to rendered inadmissible or rejected as groundless.

After the ISPs questioned the accuracy of translations, and the authenticity and validity of IFPI/BAMP legal documents, the Court appointed forensic experts to investigate. The details of the various findings occupy a large part of the decision, including details of a dispute related to the claimants’ standing to bring a claim and the eventual termination of claims relating to unnamed foreign music producers.

ISPs Required to Block Pirate Bay and Zamunda

The Sofia City Court ultimately decided that the ISPs must block both sites.

“[T]he defendant companies, in their capacity as providers of Internet access, should be sentenced to take action within a period of up to six months, the necessary actions to stop the illegal use by envisaging and implementing measures aimed at blocking the Internet access of its users, to the web pages on which the online file sharing platforms ‘ThePirateBay’ and ‘Zamunda’ are accessible.”

The ISPs will be able to determine their own methods of blocking to “best match their resources and capacity,” with a threshold of “at least making it difficult to carry out unauthorized visits” to The Pirate Bay and Zamunda.

Industry Groups Stay Positive

In a joint press release, the recording industry groups focused on the positives.

“We welcome the decision of the Sofia City Court, which marks a major step forward in the recorded music industry’s fight against online music piracy,” said BAMP executive director Petya Tocharova

“For the first time in Bulgaria, a court decision has been issued to block access to pirate websites, and we consider this precedent an important step in the right direction.”

Francis Moore, Chief Executive of the IFPI, said: “We welcome this decision and the impact it will have on curbing illegal access to music. Copyright infringement of any kind causes serious harm to local music ecosystems and diverts money away from those who create and invest in music.”

Whether blocking two torrent sites will have much of an impact on music piracy is unclear. Research cited in the blocking decision reported 27,000 files containing music available via The Pirate Bay and 44,000 on Zamunda. The overwhelming majority of music piracy today involves content ripped from YouTube, a site with dozens of millions tracks completely unhindered by blocking.

Measurable impact of site-blocking on piracy tends to appear when many sites are blocked at once, at least according to industry reports. That raises the prospect of numerous return visits to Bulgarian courts, in potentially adversarial circumstances, at a time when cooperation is seen as the only real solution to a very complex problem.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Insatisfaits par les services de streaming et leur multiplication, voire pour des raisons idéologiques, nombreux sont ceux qui continuent d’avoir recours au piratage. [Lire la suite]

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