Portugal Next in Line to Block The Pirate Bay

• Ernesto
• September 26, 2013
• Portugal,
  tpb

A coalition of copyright trade groups in Portugal will go to court with a demand that Internet providers should block The Pirate Bay and several other sites deemed to facilitate copyright infringement. The groups state that blockades have already been proven successful in other countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands. The Pirate Bay is very popular in Portugal and currently ranks as the country’s 29th most-visited website.
The Pirate Bay is without doubt one of the most censored websites on the Internet.
Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and this list continues to expand.
This week a coalition of Portuguese copyright trade groups announced they will file for an injunction to prevent ISPs from providing access to The Pirate Bay and other infringing sites.
The groups, backed by the major movie studios, plan to file the necessary paperwork at the Intellectual Property Court in the coming months.
“We still have to solve some technical and legal issues, but we anticipate delivering the injunction to the Intellectual Property Court by the end of 2013,” confirmed Paulo Santos, the leader of the two groups in this matter.
Santos notes that website blocking has proven to be effective abroad, and also in Portugal where blocks are in place to filter out other offensive material.
“Telecom operators and ISPs already use similar filters today to prevent access to pedophile content, or sites that promote violence or racism,” the anti-piracy boss says.
The groups expect that the Internet providers may not be happy with the application, but they are convinced that the court will decide in their favor. This belief is undoubtedly strengthened by court orders against ISPs in other European countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Belgium, Italy and Finland.
“I think the court will accept the injunction. Of course there can always be procedural issues, but we have reason and right on our side,” Santos says.
If the court agrees it will be the first time that Internet providers in Portugal are required to block a website on copyright grounds.
Whether such a blockade will be very successful remains to be seen though, as there are plenty of alternatives and circumvention tools available. This includes VPN services, the many proxies that make up 8% of The Pirate Bay’s total traffic, and TPB’s own PirateBrowser.
These tools appear to be widely used to circumvent censorship. Last month researchers from the University of Amsterdam released a report suggesting that the court-ordered Pirate Bay block has had no impact on piracy rates in the Netherlands.
“Blocking access to TPB has had no lasting net impact on the overall number of downloaders from illegal sources, as people learn to use alternatives to TPB,” the report concluded.