No one was expecting the UK to stop at blocking The Pirate Bay and some relatively minor UseNet site. Once the floodgates are open, they stay open. Three more BitTorrent sites are now banned in the UK, ISPs must prevent their subscribers from accessing them.
The names of the three should be familiar to pirates and anyone who follows the scene, they've been circulated ahead of the ban in fact, Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy, obviously, some of the most popular BitTorrent sites in the UK, at the moment.
The British Phonographic Industry argues that the sites are dedicated to nothing more than copyright infringement and the British High Court found no reason to argue with that.
The BPI asked several ISPs, the same ones that blocked The Pirate Bay, to do the same with the next sites on their hit list.
Thankfully, the ISPs at least wanted a court order before they complied, though that didn't prove much of a hurdle for the BPI since the court only listened to one point of view, the BPI's.
Closing off access to The Pirate Bay hasn't resulted in a decrease in piracy, at least in terms of BitTorrent traffic, as several studies have shown.
In fact, a recent report from the NDP Group showed that music downloads in the US dropped considerably but only when people had legal alternatives, such as Spotify.
Other types of piracy didn't show a similar drop, indicating that it wasn't the deterrents that pushed people, but services that were in sync with their needs.
What's more, the blocks themselves are hardly effective, plenty of people still access The Pirate Bay in the UK, via proxies, VPNs and so on. Others simply moved on to other sites, which they'll do once the blocks on these three new sites are in effect.
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