Censorship out of commercial reasons is just plain wrong.

Censoring child porn or other downright inhuman and disgusting stuff is controversial enough. But blocking a whole site just to protect commercial interest is a grim sign of things to come...

Like Valve, Notch fights piracy by making as many people like him as possible. It's a thin line to walk.

?

They ordered to block The Pirate Bay in Italy, too. At least, they tried, they always try. Obviously, they always fail....

Oh, these third-world countries and their silly shenanigans. When will they learn?

Yeah, and people will start using isohunt or piratebay changes domain if they deem it important enough. So fucking what, whoever comes up with this crap has no understanding of the web. It's like a grumpy grandpa who's using landmines to prevent pidgeons from eventering his property.

That would be so awesome...

You know how this goes.

First they are gonna block torrent search engines because they are damaging for the media distributing companies. Then they are gonna block the blogs with medical elixirs and herbs because they cost money to the pharmaceutical companies. Then they are gonna block the news sites that are against the favor of the government and so on.

If the governments believe that TPB is illegal they should move against the site in court. They should not order the isp's censoring the sites I visit.

How is that different from blocking Google? How does that make UK any different than China?

But... its Irish!

On topic. I am torn over this. On the one hand, i hate censorship, but on the other hand I hate piracy. Since I don't think shutting down Piratebay will come close to getting rid of piracy, I'll side with the anti-censorship stance. I probably would anyway, but that clenches it.

TPB is a search engine and nothing more. It doesn't even hold torrent files on it's server(s) anymore. If they think TPB is illegal because it pinpoints to copyrighted material, then so is Google. You can find illegal material using Google as well.

That was kind of my point. I guess I was ambiguous. Apologies.

Edit:
What I should have written, I guess:

In general, it is a tough issue for me whether to limit internet freedom or whether to allow piracy. More often than not, I would side with allowing piracy as the lesser of two evils. In this case, shutting down Piratebay would have no appreciable effect on the amount of piracy, so the answer is even more obvious.

Nothing new, Piratebay is already blocked in Finland. Serves them right for linking to GOG games too. :) But it is interesting how the "freedom of speech" rules are bent with these, like the earlier black lists provided by the police to local ISPs, which the ISPs could use "voluntarily".

I remember reading somewhere that (possibly due to this) Bittorrent is moving more towards ed2k/Emule model, so that you could start downloading and possibly even search for files/releases without the use of web pages with torrent links. I guess that has been Bittorrent's weakest link technically, their dependency to torrent sites (which can be blocked or closed down).

I'm against block sites, but let's be honest. TPB is made to provide access to illegal material and Google is not. For me this argument was always stupid. If someone will make a site like TBP but with child porn you will defend it the same way?