Of course, now the fight against the distribution of copyrighted content is more complex than ever.
In addition to law enforcement agencies, local internet service providers and independent hacking teams are also taking down sites like The Pirate Bay. To counter them, the torrent community has seen the rise of a vast number of mirror sites, alternatives sites and proxy services.
Moreover, multiple tools like Tor and VPN services have made their way to online forums to help torrent users seamlessly access The Pirate Bay. That still doesn’t account for all the copyright groups and law firms trying to profit from taking down sites like The Pirate Bay.
The most intense fight between The Pirate Bay and copyright groups has been in the Netherlands where BREIN has made several attempts to get rid of The Pirate Bay and all of its enablers like proxy services and mirror sites. After many successes and some failures, BREIN has finally managed to get rid of one of the most known proxy services for The Pirate Bay in the world: Piratebay-proxylist.net. This proxy service registered millions of visitors per month and served users in the Netherlands and many of the other countries where The Pirate Bay is blocked.
Recently, BREIN announced that it had managed to take down Piratebay-proxylist.net after taking action against the people behind the site rather than filing complaints with ISPs and hosting providers.
Taking direct action against the administrators of the proxy site, BREIN not only brought down one of the most used TPB proxy sites but also forced the group to pay BREIN compensation for damages.
BREIN said that Piratebay-proxylist.net was one of the largest providers of proxies and mirrors which helped users bypass the blocks on The Pirate Bay.
It arranged with BREIN to pay €250,000 as compensation for the damage it caused. BREIN also extracted another €30,000 from the group behind the proxy services to cover all of its costs. BREIN also mentioned that it had seized the Piratebay-proxylist.net domain as a part of the agreement it signed with the proxy service.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that many other proxy services will take the place of the downed proxy site to serve customers and make money in the process. If groups like BREIN really want to get rid of proxy and mirror sites then they’ll have to invent new tools. Current ones simply can’t keep up with the number of new mirror and proxy sites that pop up each time they kill one of them.