While Iceland has been relatively friendly to the Pirate Bay in recent times, other Scandinavian countries have not. Greenland recently booted the Pirate Bay out, Denmark banished them ages ago under a supreme court ruling and Sweden is looking to seize thepiratebay.se domain name in the near future. All in all it isn’t looking that good for the Pirate Bay and with the most recent legislation in Norway it looks set to get a little bit worse.
Norway has taken another step towards legislation that could ban sites like the Pirate Bay as politicians have proposed several amendments to the Copyright Act which have been approved in the first parliamentary hearing. This means they are as good as passed as Norwegian parliament very rarely sees a different outcome in the second and final hearing before official adoption. This new legislation makes it easier for government agencies and authorities to monitor file sharing and have sites that break the law blocked at the ISP level according to Torrent Freak. The new amendments received broad support and are likely to be passed. In recent times Norway has faced increasing pressure on copyright infringement, back in 2009 several movie studios took the Telenor ISP to court to try and get them to block public access to the Pirate Bay. The case was rejected along with the appeal because nothing in law supported such a move, however with these new amendments, which trace their roots back to 2011 proposals, that looks set to change.
Like with all narrow ISP blocks of the Pirate Bay and other sites it remains to be seen how effective these measures will be. For as long as the original Pirate Bay servers remain online somewhere in the world then proxies will be forever able to circumvent the ISP domain blocks. It isn’t just the Pirate Bay that does this but many other sites that have been blocked are doing a similar thing, KickAssTorrents (KAT) for example has a whole host of proxies to circumvent ISP blocks in countries such as the UK.
What are your thoughts on these latest anti-piracy measures by Norway?
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