14 DAY TRIAL // Italy has taken yet another step against torrent sites by ordering ISPs to block another three sites.
The country’s regulator, AGCOM, has decided that three more torrent indexes must be banned by the local ISPs, following another four that became inaccessible last month. Torrent.cd, Torrentvia and TorrentRoom are the ones affected by the ban, joining many others on AGCOM’s blacklist. Last month, LimeTorrents, TorrentDownload.ws, TorrentDownloads.me and Torrentz.pro were added to the same list.
In fact, Italy’s authorities have been so busy with these measures that they’ve even made it off the Watch List in the USTR Special 301 Report, which lists countries where piracy is at its highest and where governments don’t take measures to fight it.
The new sites that ended up on AGCOM’s bad list are relatively small compared to other giants. For instance, as TorrentFreak points out, Torrent.cd, the largest of them all, sees Italians as the third-biggest fans of the site, following behind India and the United States.
Even TorrentToom.com, which was once among the top 5,000 sites in the world, has dropped in popularity. Italians, however, are only outnumbered by the United States, which means that local users are certainly going to feel the impact of the ban.
The Italian regulator seems to be targeting sites that are particularly important and popular among local users, which would have the most impact in lowering piracy among Italians.
However, people can still use tools such as VPNs to access the sites they want to visit, so an ISP-wide ban is often ineffective, as many other nations have found out before. Several courts in the world have admitted that banning sites in this manner is not the solution since it doesn’t solve the biggest problem and people will always find alternatives to access content illegally.
Instead, the better idea would be to provide people with cheap legal options for them to use. Back in December, AGCOM was given the power to block sites they believed to be carrying illegal content without taking the case to the courthouse. The new regulations came into power just recently and the regulator didn’t shy away from taking action.
Anti-piracy groups representing either the movie or the music industries have been quite happy about the new decision and pushed for the blocking of multiple sites. The fact that these torrent sites also host perfectly legal content seems to be completely unimportant in these circumstances.