Italian Police Confiscates Hardware Linked to Pirate Bay

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.p2pon.com/

Last month we informed you that The Pirate Bay was banned in Italy and a court order forced the country’s internet service providers to block the access to the file sharing site to their customers. The Supreme Court ruled that the blocking of BitTorrent file sharing sites could be mandatory for ISPs even with regard to the sites located outside Italy and operated by foreigners.

The Pirate Bay crew’s response didn’t take too long to appear and when it did it was under the form of another site Labaia.net (which is Italian for ‘The Bay’) which facilitated the access to The Pirate Bay for any Italian willing to do so.

But as TorrentFreak discovered the Italian police were pretty quick themselves and shut down the site; while the Labaia.net was never mentioned in the blocking lawsuit, “the original seizure regarded ‘all future domain names’ connected or linked with the original TPB IP address,” Giovanni Battista Gallus, one of The Pirate Bay’s Italian lawyers told TorrentFreak which further unfolds the story: “what is unusual is that if anyone tries to access "www.thepiratebay.org" from an Italian ISP, all they get is a timeout, but anyone trying to access the Italian-hosted Labaia.net gets a message in Italian. It seems that sites outside Italy are blocked, while those inside the country can be seized,” explains the post.

 If you wonder how the Italian file sharers took the news – well, if file sharing has taught us one thing is that it’s not at all something easy to kill – they quickly moved their needs to other torrent sites or resorted to unblocking portals like PirateBayItalia which provides p2p users with a number of ways to access torrents.

An update of the story by TorrentFreak reads:
“TorrentFreak tracked down the operator of Labaia who told us that the police took all his hardware and took copies of the entire site and logs.

He also informed us that if he’d have been asked he would’ve closed the site, but unfortunately no warning was given whatsoever. He had no idea running a proxy would constitute a crime in Europe.”

"if file sharing has taught us one thing is that it’s not at all something easy to kill "

"He had no idea running a proxy would constitute a crime in Europe."

I'm fairly certain that running a proxy in europe isn't in itself an offence. If it is it's the first that I have heard of it.