James Delahunty
11 May 2012 13:37
Pirate Party cannot help users to circumvent block.
The court in The Hague sided with anti-piracy group Brein in ordered the Pirate Party to stop publicizing ways to circumvent the block on the Pirate Bay website in the country. All major Dutch ISPs have been ordered to block access to the notorious BitTorrent website, as have most in the UK.
The Pirate Party also cannot offer a proxy that can let users obtain TPB's links without directly visiting the file sharing site. The group has described the ruling as a slap in the face of the free Internet.
"The judge decided to give the Netherlands another nudge on the gliding scale of censorship," it said. "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."
In the UK, the Pirate Party continues to instruct users on how to get around the Pirate Bay blockade in effect in the country. It will be interesting to see if the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) tries to follow Brein and have a court gag them.