Italy Blocks The Pirate Bay
It's not uncommon to hear of dictatorial governments that have blocked internet sites, cutting access to sites that spread information that could be harmful to the dictators. China's internet policy has been mentioned quite a bit in the lead-up to the Olympics. In today's news it was revealed that an Italian judge has completely blocked a popular file-sharing site:
A judge in the northern town of Bergamo, Italy, has ordered Italian ISPs (Internet service providers) to block access to the Swedish file-sharing Web site The Pirate Bay in a crackdown on the illegal sharing of copyright material over the Internet.
This is a first for Italy, and it is impossible to connect to Pirate Bay from Italy. Pirate Bay responded by inviting Italian users to switch to OpenDNS to bypass their ISPs' filters or use the alternative URL http://labaia.org - "the bay" in Italian. But Italian authorities were quick to block access to that site, along with alternative Web addresses and even future addresses connected to Pirate Bay. The alternative site works for me, but possibly not for people inside Italy.
Italy's Prime Minister is out to put an end to copyright infringement and is strangling the free information with his media connection. He is the founder and majority owner of Fininvest, a media and finance conglomerate that controls much of the nation's television market within the Mediaset empire, as well as the film company Medusa. Last month the same judge ordered the closure of Italy's leading Bit Torrent Web site and prosecutions are being prepared against three of its administrators.
The Pirate Bay is facing a lawsuit at the moment from the MPAA, who is demanding $15.4 million from The Pirate Bay to cover claimed losses from torrents of "Harry Potter," "Syriana," "The Pink Panther," "Walk the Line" and 13 episodes of the television show "Prison Break." The MPAA recently won a $110 million judgement against TorrentSpy but the tracker receives more than 20 million visitors a month so it doesn't seem to have slowed business any.
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