IFPI Forces Danish ISP to Block The Pirate Bay Ernesto

The battle between the IFPI and the Pirate Bay continues. A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP "Tele2?$B!m (DMT2-Tele2) to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures.

The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry - and plans to force other ISPs to do the same. However, The Pirate Bay is determined to fight back, as usual.

The Pirate Bay team has already asked other BitTorrent admins to stand up against the IFPI lobby, and arranged a meeting with Tele2 to discuss the current events. Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak in a response: "I hope the torrent community understands what this will do to Danish people. It will also act as a very bad precedent for the European Union, and I hope everybody will fight this."

At the moment, The Pirate Bay team is registering new (Danish) domains, to make sure people can still download .torrent files from the Bay when the ban is activated later today tomorrow. In addition the Pirate Bay will launch a campaign website, together with the Danish pro-piracy lobby "Piratgruppen".

Sebastian Gjerding, spokesperson for Piratgruppen, a pro-piracy lobby whose goals are to reform current copyright law and protect consumers' rights, is not pleased with the news. He told TorrentFreak: "The verdict is absurd. It will block access for danish users to the worlds largest distributor of culture and knowledge - copyrighted or not. It's true that you can access copyrighted material through The Pirate Bay, as you can with Google or Rapidshare. Should they be blocked as well?"

"It's very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry," Sebastian adds.

This is not the first time a Danish ISP has been ordered to censor the Internet. In December 2006 A Danish court ruled against Tele2 in a similar case, and ordered the ISP to block all access to Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, the ISP was willingly infringing copyright if their customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

IFPI has announced it will continue it's battle against BitTorrent sites in Europe. Last month they tried to convince European lawmakers that ISPs should block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay, and block filesharing protocols, no matter what they're being used for. Luckily, these proposals were rejected.

We will follow this campaign, and the response from Denmark closely.

Stay tunes for updates!