TorrentFreak Email Update

Band Shows Fans How To Unblock The Pirate Bay

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 04:10 AM PDT

promo bay Finland is one of many European countries where The Pirate Bay is censored.

May last year the Finnish branch of the music industry body IFPI and the local Anti-Piracy Center filed a lawsuit against Elisa, the largest Internet provider in the country. The ISP lost the case and was ordered to block subscriber access to TPB, a ruling they are now taking to the Supreme Court.

The anti-piracy groups, meanwhile, moved on to other ISPs and this week Sonera began blocking the torrent site after a court order, and will soon be followed by Tele Finland.

While IFPI and the local Anti-Piracy Center see the rulings as a blessing for the entertainment industry and artists worldwide, this view is not shared by everyone in the music industry. In fact, the Finnish band Alymysto – whose lead singer is the producer of the popular Nazi zombie movie Iron Sky – calls the blockades “insane.”

Like thousands of other independent artists, Alymysto sees The Pirate Bay as an important service through which they can promote their work. Blocking the site hurts their ability to reach more fans, which may result in reduced income in the long run.

“We don’t want the courts to mess with our Pirate Bay based promotion,” Alymysto’s Janos Honkonen tells TorrentFreak. “We’ve embraced the Internet since the beginning. Our stuff is on sale in most of the web stores, but it’s also been up for grabs as a torrent and a direct download.”

Because of the blockade, potential fans can no longer download their work, but luckily the band has a solution.

In an article on their website Alymysto shows that it’s not that hard to get around the block. They link to the piraattilahti.org website and also mention a list of other proxies that allow fans to bypass the blockade. In addition, the band mentions that VPNs are a good option to access The Pirate Bay.

Besides from hurting the band’s promotion, Alymysto points out that blocking sites such as The Pirate Bay is an ineffective solution to begin with. According to them, the entertainment industry should focus on offering a better service to consumers instead.

“The only way to fight piracy is to create systems that make it easy to sell music, movies and TV programs digitally with as little lag and friction as possible in international markets, to take care of your fans and customers and to cultivate good PR,” they say.

The example above once again shows when it comes to blocking The Pirate Bay, the interests of the major labels can be quite different from those of independent artists.

Interestingly, the music industry groups are not completely oblivious to this issue. Preparing for more UK blockades, the BPI polled its members and affiliated groups last month to find out whether any of the musicians had “licensed” their work to BitTorrent sites.

Whether protests from smaller bands will be heard by the major labels is doubtful though.

Source: Band Shows Fans How To Unblock The Pirate Bay

Pirate Bay Proxies Force Nasty Crapware on Visitors

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 09:32 AM PDT

tpb In recent months Pirate Bay proxies have become extremely popular.

After several large ISPs in the UK and the Netherlands were ordered to block the BitTorrent site earlier this year, reverse proxy sites popped up left and right.

A list of 100+ of these proxies is maintained by PirateReverse, which has been plugged by The Pirate Bay on several occasions. However, starting three days ago several of the proxies on the top of this list turned evil.

Piratereverse.info, Livepirate.com and Getpirate.com are among the sites that started to force nasty crapware on visitors. Those who visited the sites in question could no longer click on any of the download links unless they installed the SnappyDee toolbar.

While the image below suggests that the offer can be canceled, the same pop-over simply reloaded when we tried. And we are not the only ones who noticed this.

Proxy crapware

crapware

These toolbar makers offer publishers up to $1 per install so these schemes can be quite lucrative. Assuming that thousands of people accepted these “free download” offers, the operator(s) of the proxy sites in question may have raked in a healthy profit over the weekend.

Needless to say, The Pirate Bay team is not happy with this development. They told TorrentFreak that they have a few options to take these sites out if they continue to force these toolbars on their users.

TorrentFreak contacted PirateReverse for a comment on the situation, asking how it can be that their domain also serves these ads. We have yet to hear back but on their Twitter account PirateReverse says it has nothing to do with the toolbar offer. It could be that the people maintaining the proxy list are not the same as those who operate the proxy.

Whatever the case, The Pirate Bay team is now encouraging proxy users not to accept these scammy offers, and to use alternatives proxies such as the one operated by the UK Pirate Party.

As more and more ISPs are ordered to block The Pirate Bay, proxy sites continue to gain in popularity. Yesterday the Finnish ISP Sonera began blocking the torrent site after a court order, and soon Tele Finland is expected to follow suit.

Due to the widespread availability of proxies the blockades are believed to be ineffective, something Dutch and UK ISPs recently confirmed.

Update: Right after we finished writing this article the crapware vanished from the proxies, at least temporarily.

Update: The PirateReverse people replied with the following message.

“We now only manage about.piratereverse.info which includes the guide and proxy list, we do not manage the actual proxy, this has been delegated to a totally separate team. It is unfortunate that this has taken place, and we started our own investigation to find out what is happening.”

Source: Pirate Bay Proxies Force Nasty Crapware on Visitors

The Pirate's Press

Wednesday, 1 August 2012