Ok, the title is a little exaggeration - but only a little. Recently the Italian government has blocked access to The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is a site that allows people to download torrent files of popular entertainment and software. They even have comic books. The thing is that The Pirate Bay hosts only the torrent files and not the illegal content itself, which makes it rather ridicolous to think that blocking the site will stop piracy.

Torrent files are also used for legit purposes as well. i won’t list them all here, but you can find more info on legit torrents here.

Popular Swedish file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay has been blocked by most of the major Italian Internet service providers, the company said in a note on its blog.

The action follows Italian law enforcement’s actions in last month to shut down Colombo-BT.org, which the IFPI called the largest BitTorrent site in the country and which offered links to 390,000 music and 500,000 movie files.

For its part, The Pirate Bay said it has already changed IP for the site, which the group said should return access to half of the ISPs.

It also recommended Italians switch their DNS to OpenDNS, “so they can bypass their ISP filters,” and directed users to LaBaia.org (Italian for “The Bay”), which is operational.

Tags: p2p,the pirate bay,torrents
Categories: Censorship, Electronic Communication Technologies