Pirate Bay to be blocked in Iceland?

The Reykjavik District Court has made a ruling that Vodafone and Hringdu should block access to Icelandic torrent site deildu.net and one of the largest torrent websites in the world, Pirate Bay. The websites to be blocked are www.deildu.net, www.deildu.com, www.thepira­tebay.se, www. thepira­tebay.sx and the piratebay.org.

STEF, the association for the rights of musicians which fights for copyrights claimed the injunction. This ruling has now been passed to the district magistrate in Reykjavík. 

“We will never reach a final victory in the battle so it makes sense for people to realize that it’s likely that new sites will spring up. However, following similar actions abroad visitor numbers to such sites have declined significantly,” said Guðrún Bjarnadóttir at STEF who urges other telecommunications company to also block access to the sites. 

MP for the Pirate party, Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson says the court ruling is a sad day for the internet. "There is however, a good side and a bad side to the matter," he adds. " The good thing is that this is not going to work. Something else will just replace those sites and there are ways to access the same material as before."

He adds that if people want to battle technology they have to go very far, much further than we would want to go in a democratic society. "The problem is that while technology advances at an astounding rate, the legislator is always several steps behind."