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Virgin first to follow court order to block Pirate Bay

by Mark Tyson on 3 May 2012, 10:27

Tags: Virgin (NASDAQ:VMED), The Pirate Bay

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Following on from our report on Tuesday about the High Court ruling requesting UK ISPs block access to The Pirate Bay (TPB), Virgin has become the first of the ISPs to put such a restriction in place.

Virgin forum manager Mark Wilkin wrote to confirm the order had been acted upon yesterday at 5.12pm. He put it this way; “And to update you the Pirate Bay is now blocked across our network. Thanks.” Trying to access The Pirate Bay through your Virgin Media connection will bring you to the following redirect message.

Virgin TPB

In a typical response to the news about the court order, TPB issued a statement: “Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 MILLION more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before. We should write a thank you note to the BPI.” The blog at TPB suggests several “easy” ways to get by the block and be able to access their site “As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block. Use a VPN service to be anonymous and get an uncensored internet access, you should do this anyhow. Or use TOR, I2P or some other darknet with access to the internets. Change your DNS settings with OpenDNS. Or use Google’s DNS servers... we could go on...”

Many computer users will already be using VPN or OpenDNS for other reasons so would need no further computer network settings tweaking. An even simpler solution to access TPB though a browser, with no tweaking required, is by going to Piratereverse.info (a reverse proxy site, one of several) which is reported to work fine for people on Virgin Media. Anyone who can Google can get this information, never mind the raft of sites that offer the same kind of .torrent listings as TPB that are out there.

HEXUS Forums :: 16 Comments

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Posted by g8ina - Thu 03 May 2012 10:31
With so many alternatives and workrounds, it does make you wonder why they bother blocking it.
Posted by anselhelm - Thu 03 May 2012 10:46
Sigh.

It saddens me how the courts have become the playthings of corporations and copyright groups. Furthermore, they do not seem to comprehend the simple concept of the Streisand Effect.

Whilst I may not condone copyright infringement per se, the industries have NOT offered a genuine and viable alternative to it, especially if you want lossless music or blu ray quality 1080P videos at a price reflecting the lack of cost to physically produce and distribute it.

Look at the computer game platform Steam. Though it has DRM, the DRM is completely transparent and the frequent sales make the platform a genuinely good one. This is the model that everyone should be aiming for, rather than censorship.

It would also help if the idiots in charge would learn the difference between theft, copyright infringement and piracy. Downloading something that you do not own is NOT theft, as the original is still there. Moreover, most downloads of this nature would never have resulted in a real life sale in any case (hence no actual loss) and real evidence shows that some of the people who pirate films the most actually go to see the most films at the cinema.

/rant off
Posted by Scribe - Thu 03 May 2012 11:01
You know it's because, unlike newzbin, Pirate Bay by promoting torrents, hammers Virgin's network, especially its upload and is a big contributor to peak-time bandwidth restrictions. Otherwise I doubt they'd have been in such a rush. There's even a European court ruling that says they don't have to comply to blocking, hence why BT wanted to first consider its stance on the matter.
Posted by Fraz - Thu 03 May 2012 11:03
Meh - I agree it's a fairly pointless action. Still, I have little tolerance for people downloading music, films and games these days when they have not paid one iota at any point for the intellectual property. And by that, I'm talking about people that don't support the industry at any level, either through going to the cinema to see the film, buying the CD, or attending the gig. It's stupid on many levels. Sure there are some really big companies/films/artists/etc out there that rake it in regardless of the pirates, but it really stifles the smaller artists/creators, starving them of the income they deserve.

And on a more personal level, when I used to download/blag music many years ago when I was a student, it totally devalued the experience. I'd have tons of music, most of which I didn't want, and none of it held that “treasured album” feel of buying something I really wanted and listening to it many times. I just ended up with too much choice, and a whole bunch of music I hadn't even heard of let alone wanted to listen to. I'd imagine the same would be true of copied console/PC games, although I never did this.

Nowadays I pay for what I want, and I'm a lot happier for it.
Posted by Arthran - Thu 03 May 2012 11:13
Fraz
Still, I have little tolerance for people downloading music, films and games these days when they have not paid one iota at any point for the intellectual property. And by that, I'm talking about people that don't support the industry at any level, either through going to the cinema to see the film, buying the CD, or attending the gig.

Does that mean people who do support the industry but use downloads to supplement what they cant get through normal channels get some tolerance?

I hate discussions on Piracy, because it always ends up being looked at in black and white, when in reality its a ton of shades of grey.

On topic, Virgin being first makes me glad I moved to BT. I rarely if ever use TPB, but knowing there IS a ton of legit material there, and even so much as artists like Dan Bull used it to get into the charts with a free single, I find it repulsive that we have an ISP that feels censorship is the answer to another industries issues. We are fast following the US down a dangerous path, how long till we try to pull a MegaUpload?

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