It’s not a great week for filesharers in Pakistan, after the country started blocking access to The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, Torrentz and ExtraTorrent as part of a crackdown on piracy. State-owned ISP Pakistan Telecommunications Company has reportedly been working with filtering company Netsweeper to block the sites, although TorrentFreak reports that it’s not just torrent sites that have been affected. Tumblr is thought to be inaccessible due to being classified as pornography, while atheist Richard Dawkins’ website also appears to be blocked. The trouble with filters is that they can be gotten around: Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents proxy sites are still accessible in Pakistan, for example, and as they are shut down, others will pop up. Pakistan is a complex market, where issues of piracy are mixed up with those of free-speech and free access to information online. There are incentives beyond piracy for internet users to look for ways around ISP-level blocking, in other words. Even so, it will be interesting to see if legal digital music services like Saavn and Dhingana get a boost from the blocks.
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This article seems to be a copy of an original that appeared on torrentfreak.com yesterday, yet you guys are locking it away behind a paywall.
How come they published it for free but your business model only allows readers to view it in return for a subscription?
Sounds a bit like piracy for profit, or something similar haha 🙂
Hi Alan, you’re right in that the source is TorrentFreak, but wrong in your suggestion that this story is a copy. In fact, they’re fully acknowledged in the text, with a link back:
“State-owned ISP Pakistan Telecommunications Company has reportedly been working with filtering company Netsweeper to block the sites, although TorrentFreak reports that it’s not just torrent sites that have been affected”
And in fact, the latter half of our story is our own thoughts on what’s happening in Pakistan, and what it means for rightsholders and digital music services.
Outside the paywall, I can understand why you might draw the conclusion that we’ve ripped off their article, but that’s very much not the case. TorrentFreak regularly break news in this field, and whenever we refer to something they’ve published, it’s always with full credit.