Interesting issue all around. Italy ordered all Italian ISP companies to block "The Pirate Bay", the torrent search engine most popular in Italy. Most ISPs have already complied... but the site has already countered as well, by changing its IP, adding new ones, etc. As of this moment I was able to access the site, but I'm also using OpenDS to bypass ISP filters so I'm not sure how effective the censorship order has been just yet. Of course the move by the Italian government is against European law.


Here's a fun snippet from one of the linked blogs (coming from someone within the censored site):

"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 Berlusconi's empire."


http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-blocked-in-italy-080809/

http://thepiratebay.org/blog/123

Is this related to the Colombo-BT raid in July? I saw they were charging the site operators with copyright infringement, which could get them 3 years in prison and a big fine.

Yep... the same people were behind the Colombo torrent shutdown. The thing is they are just search engines, and perfectly legal. The shut-downs and IP censorships are the illegal bit.

Just to add for balance: Yes BT's can be used to share music and movies with those who haven't payed for the rights to view or listen... but they have much more legal commercial and private uses. It just happens to be one of the most effective large data transferring methods. One could also send a copy of a movie on DVD to a friend who hasn't bought it through the mail. No one would blame the mail service.