Austria is the latest country to issue blocking orders against The Pirate Bay and other copyright infringing sites The blocks in Austria were secured last weeks and local internet service provider A1 Telekom will instigate the block, with the head of the local branch of record label trade group IFPI, Franz Medwenitsch, remarking that: "For the further development of the online music market this is a very gratifying decision. We call on the internet providers to work together towards a legally compliant and straightforward implementation of site-blocking".
In Germany, collecting society GEMA has been trying to secure an injunction against digital locker links site 3DL.am under existing copyright laws there. It hasn't succeeded in lower courts, but the matter is now with Germany's Supreme Court, which hasnow said it will rule on the matter in November. If GEMA fails, it is expected to lobby that Germany (as has happended in in Australia) should have specific web-block system introduced by law.
The Pirate Bay re-emerged following a countdown to much trumpeted 1st Feb relaunch and the site appears to be similar to the way it was before Swedish authorities took the service offline during a server raid on 9th December last year, albeit currently a phoenix currently sits on the home page where the site's pirate ship logo would normally be seen. The platform seems to have collapsed several times, very possibly due to high demand for its database of links to unlicensed music, movies and TV shows. The returning site does not yet serve ads.
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/198644-the-pirate-bay-is-back-and-has-barely-lost-a-step
The Supreme Court in Belgium has upheld an earlier ruling that forces internet service providers in the country to put web-blocks in place against all "current and future domains" utilised by The Pirate Bay. The Belgian Anti-Piracy Foundation began legal action to force ISPs in the country to block access to the Bay on copyright grounds in 2011, securing an injunction against net firms Belgacom and Telenet on second attempt.
Peter Sunde, the co-founder and formerly the official spokesperson for the controversial file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, hopes to stand in next year's European Parliament elections, running for the Finnish Pirate Party.
File-sharing website The Pirate Bay has shifted its primary domain to the island of Saint Maarten just days after moving to an Icelandic TLD, which in turn followed a move to a Greenland-registered web address last month, which had been used in place of a Swedish .se domain for the main Pirate Bayweb address when it got wind of the fact efforts were being made to have that web address seized. Danish court rulings about the illegality of the site may have influenced the move from Greenland, which is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark - although Sint Maarten is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands which may be less than helpful in the long term for the new "Pirates of the Caribbean".
