Swedish BitTorrent Tracker site responds by setting up mirror site called "Labaia," which means "The Bay" in Italian, and showing how futile efforts to censor the Internet in a supposedly democratic country can be.
It was almost two weeks ago that I reported on how Colombo-BT.org, the apparent largest BitTorrent tracker site in Italy, had been shut down by Italian police.
The Guardia di Finanza undertook the action in cooperation with FPM, the Italian anti-music piracy group affiliated with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
In a strange sign of things to come Enzo Mazza, president of the FPM, called Colombo-BT.org "Italy’s version of The Pirate Bay." For now, after having shuttered Colombo-BT, Italian authorities have ordered the country’s ISPs to begin blocking The Pirate Bay.
From The Pirate Bay blog:
We’re quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators.
This time it’s Italy. They suffer from a really bad background as one of the IFPIs was formed in Italy during the fascist years and now they have a fascist leader in the country, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi is also the most powerful person in Italian media owning a lot of companies that compete with The Pirate Bay and he would like to stay that way – so one of his lackeys, Giancarlo Mancusi, ordered a shutdown of our domain name and IP in Italy to make it hard to not support Berlusconis empire.
We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.
The Pirate Bay, no strangers to being blocked by ISPs, have already developed several work arounds for the Italian BitTorrent community, just as they did for Danes after a Danish court ordered ISP Tele2 Denmark to begin blocking subscribers from accessing it almost 6 months ago.
In addition to changing the IP addresses for The Pirate Bay, which "makes it work for half the ISPs again," they have also set up a mirror site called La Baia (labaiia.org) which means "The Bay" in Italian.
The Pirate Bay also recommends that Italian BitTorrent users switch their DNS to OpenDNS so they can bypass their ISPs filters. As a "bonus," this practice will also let them bypass the other filters installed by the Italian government.
Though the IFPI and Italian authorities may disagree, the real winner here is The Pirate Bay for it once again proves that efforts to censor or filter the Internet are absolutely futile in a supposedly democratic country.
Arrrr!







I wanted to bring up something that might have some bearing on the anti-free-range attitudes of most parents. ,
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