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Pirate Party Shuts Down Pirate Bay Proxy After Legal Threats (torrentfreak.com)
61 points by Libertatea on Dec 19, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



Just got an email from them:

Dear Donor,

Thank you for your support in the last few weeks, the donations we received, as well as the overwhelming number of messages of support made it clear that our efforts over the last year or so have not been in vain.

It is however with a heavy heart that I write to inform you that the proxy server the Pirate Party UK initially provided in solidarity with other parties in Europe, but later as an anti-censorship resource for UK users, has now been been removed.

Obviously this is not the outcome you wanted, nor that we had hoped for, so if you would like us to return your donation please reply to this email, or email returns@pirateparty.org.uk with the email address you provided (either your paypal email address or the email address you contacted the party with when making your donation). We will return your donation as soon as we can.

As you know, elected members of the parties National Executive Committee, along with the head of IT, received letters from lawyers acting for British Phonographic Industry (BPI), threatening them personally with High Court legal action.

After seeking exhaustive advice and initiating the fundraising campaign that you contributed to we managed to raise just over £9,000. A significant sum and an indication that this issue is important. Unfortunately the advice from a variety of legal sources was bleak and even to get to this point we spent just under £1600, the cost involved in taking this forward is out of our reach with no guarantee of a positive result.

We also made attempts to open dialogue with the BPI, but it has become clear that the law as it stands makes any decision to continue hosting the proxy untenable and counterproductive.

We will continue to fight for digital rights despite being threatened with legal action by the UK’s music industry body over links to the Pirate Bay website.

Again if you would like us to return your donation please reply to this email, or email returns@pirateparty.org.uk with the email address you provided (either your paypal email address or the email address you contacted the party with when making your donation). We will return your donation as soon as we can.

Gavin Meredith Treasurer Pirate Party UK


Why don't they just replace the proxy with a list of other proxies for TPB? Any problem can be solved with just one more level of indirection...


Odd move. While the Swedish Pirate Party actually supply the site itself with bandwidth, one would think the UK side would dare to maintain a proxy.

Will be interesting to see more details on the more precise details of the threats.


I wonder how significant the dropoff of users will be!


I don't think it will be significant. People who use the torrents know to quickly google something like "the pirate bay proxy" and get access back.

"Can't stop the signal, Mal."


At least until Google starts censoring keywords like that (probably not too far out), and then they'll have to use DDG or Blekko.


Given that DDG mainly relies on bings index I'd be surprised if they'd resist much longer than google if the keyword filtering starts.


blekko has its own crawl and index, but your guess is as good as mine as to what we might do if we are sued.


The no statements, no explanations, part of the story can have rather large effect on the party. That in itself is enough to kill any smaller political party, especially if the politics they are pushing for is more transparency.


A little disappointing but not entirely unexpected considering. What's sad is an industry that fails to realise they have a supply problem and will never win that war


http://194.71.107.80/ still works at least here in Belgium.


They should allow that for all their ip's

194.71.107.15 does a hard redirect to their domain


not in the UK


Bin your shitty ISP. I just switched to Andrews and Arnold and the main site still works. They have an active no censorship policy.


An ISP complying with a court order does not make them inherently shitty.

Looking at A&A, the max bandwidth/mo they offer is 500GB? We pull that in per week and at a much lower cost.


Can they not host it on a webserver outside of the UK?




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