Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

Couple of months ago The Pirate Bay was blocked in Italy by a court order according to which ISPs were asked to censor the site in the country. The court accused the administrators of the site for infringing the copyrights and making the stuff available on internet and using it for commercial use.

How ever the popular BitTorrent tracker disagreed with the order and responded strongly. Of course they were not going to sit quietly and accept the decision, they fought back and they did it very well. As a result the site was unblocked in Italy and now there is something interesting came up. The Court of Bergamo has now declared that the earlier block was unjustified and they explained the reason.

According to the court statement, on alleged copyright infringement, a criminal court is not allowed to issue an order to ISPs asking them to block traffic to a foreign website. The Italian law implements the European Directive, according to which the ruling should be valid to other European countries also.

According to The Pirate Bay’s lawyers, Giovanni Battista Gallus and Francesco Micozzi:

Under Italian law, this is possible only for child porn and for unauthorized gambling, but there is no such provision for copyright infringement.

Furthermore they said:

We have to make sure that no legislative bill promoting such filtering provisions will be passed in the future. At the European level, many authorities pointed out the need to find a balance between the enforcement of alleged copyright infringements, users’ rights, and privacy issues.

One interesting thing which happened due to this block was that the site got even more popular and gained a 5% increase from Italy. This was something which the people on other side of the fence were not expecting but it happened. If you want to make your site popular, maybe you can get blocked in a European country and that will help you out if the court is on your side.