This weekend millions of Indian Internet users started to notice that their favorite websites were no longer accessible.

On Friday the Government ordered local Internet providers to block access to a list of 857 websites, including many of the top porn sites.

“Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India,” was the warning many got to see instead.

The move has sparked outrage among the public, who condemn the Government for censoring the Internet without proper cause. According to the court order the sites are being blocked because they threaten the morality and decency of Indians, which a local official has now confirmed.

“Free and open access to porn websites has been brought under check. We don’t want them to become a social nuisance,” a spokesman at the Department of Telecommunications told Reuters.

The Government order is quite broad, and not just because of the high number of domain names involved. A leaked copy which list all of the affected domains reveals some unsuspected entries.

For example, the list contains two of the largest torrent sites, Kickass.to and H33t.to. The first is now operating under the new Kat.cr domain name and the latter site is down, so the effects of the blockade are minimal.

While blocking these torrent sites may be justified as both sites do link to pornographic content, the same can’t really be said for CollegeHumor and 9Gag, which are also on the blacklist.

The same goes for Liveleak, which has plenty of ‘immoral’ videos but isn’t really known for its vast amounts of porn. Finally, the list also includes nonvegjokes.com, a site specializing in dirty jokes.

The blocking order was issued under Rule 12 of the local Information Technology Rules, which allows the Government to block access to sites that are deemed to violate the integrity or security of India.

The Government still has to justify its blocking request before the end of the month. If those arguments prove insufficient, the court order may be overturned again. In the meantime, the interest in circumvention tools such as VPN services and proxy sites is expected to skyrocket.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.

As the bastion of online piracy, The Pirate Bay has become one of the most censored websites on the Internet in recent years.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site and the list continues to expand.

The latest blocking order was issued right before the weekend in Austria. Following a complaint from copyright holders the Commercial Court of Vienna ordered local ISP A1 Telekom to block subscribers access to The Pirate Bay.

In addition to the notorious torrent site, the court order also requires the Internet provider to block three other “structurally infringing” sites; Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

The court allows the ISP to choose how to implement the blockade on a technical level but it is likely to involve DNS-blocking, an IP-address blacklist or a combination of both.

If A1 Telekom chooses a DNS blockade then users can easily circumvent the measures by using a non-ISP DNS server. A combination of a DNS and IP-address block is generally more effective, but with the wide availability of proxy sites and VPN services that’s not airtight either.

Franz Medwenitsch, managing director of the Austrian music industry association IFPI, welcomes the court order and notes that they are happy to assist with the implementation of the blockades.

“For the further development of the online music market it is a very gratifying decision. We call on the Internet providers to work together towards a legally compliant and straightforward implementation of site-blocking,” Medwenitsch says.

The current court order follows hot on the heels of another major blocking case in Austria, which came to an end last month.

After a round of appeals the Supreme Court ordered several leading Austrian ISPs to block the major streaming sites Movie4K.to and Kinox.to. The Court further rules that the Internet providers will have to pay the costs for future blockades.

Given the recent successes, it wouldn’t be a surprise if more blocking requests will follow during the months to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Hot Pursuit is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	Hot Pursuit	4.9 / trailer
2	(2)	Furious 7	7.6 / trailer
3	(1)	Insurgent	6.6 / trailer
4	(…)	Minions (HDTS)	6.7 / trailer
5	(3)	Jurassic World (TS/Subbed HDrip)	7.7 / trailer
6	(8)	Terminator Genisys (TS)	7.0 / trailer
7	(…)	Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (HDTS)	8.0 / trailer
8	(5)	Ted 2 (Subbed HDrip)	6.9 / trailer
9	(6)	Home	6.8 / trailer
10	(7)	The Longest Ride	7.1 / trailer

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.

Political scientists have this concept called “natural rights”. It’s a right you have innately, even if there is no law enforcement or indeed any government. Such rights include the right to think freely, the right to use your senses, the right to speak your mind, and the right to hold property (starting with your own body).

In contrast, laws that restrict such rights cannot exist without a government to enforce such laws. This is crucial to understanding what can be considered a starting point for society; if you have a blank slate, what laws and rights exist before you’ve put the first ink to paper.

The copyright industry tries repeatedly to portray itself as in the moral right from a high horse, when advocating restrictions to copying and sharing. That’s not just wrong, it’s also blatantly dishonest and false, and knowingly so. The copyright monopoly is a protectionist mechanism, a remnant from before the free-enterprise reform of the mid-1800s, that has no place in a society built on creativity and innovation. The monopoly is not just destructive and wrong, but also draconian and arbitrary.

Let’s examine how natural rights come into play when sharing knowledge and culture.

To create a bitstream of a file, say Gameofthrones.s05e10.1080p.WOOT.mkv, we observe that this file exists somewhere. We use our own senses, and technology extensions to our own senses using our own property (a computer, a router, network cables, etc.), to observe the existence of this stream, and the bitpattern that makes up particular stream. After observing what the bitpattern looks like, we rearrange our own property – magnetic fields on our hard drive – to match what we are observing with our senses.

From a natural rights perspective, this is identical to a painter using their property – paint, brushes, bristles – to record onto a canvas what they’re seeing with their eyes. It’s not just perfectly fine, it’s completely expected behavior.

Now, it may be that exercising natural rights in this case interferes with dreamed-up business models by the copyright industry. But natural rights don’t take a back seat to somebody’s imaginary right to profit. They’re on a different level altogether. While there are laws that limit natural rights, they are generally seen as hideously immoral and to be practiced with enormous restraint.

However, the conclusion here is that copying is the natural state, a mere exercise of natural rights, and restriction of such copying is an arbitrary and draconian intrusion into natural rights, an anachronistic remnant from the pre-free-enterprise era which has no place in the age of the Internet.

Finally, I said that the copyright industry is “knowingly” deceptive on this point. By that, I am referring to the fact that they keep reiterating that people who are exercising their natural rights are “stealing”, despite the U.S. Supreme Court clearly having ruled the opposite, which they are well aware of, and also that the copyright industry has been explicitly banned by court from using such deceptive and disingenuous language.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.

In the hope of steering prospective customers away from pirate sites, copyright holders are overloading Google with DMCA takedown notices.

These requests have increased dramatically over the years. In 2008, the search engine received only a few dozen takedown notices during the entire year, but the same number is now reached in a matter of seconds.

At TF we processed the number of URLs submitted by copyright holders over the past month, which were roughly 47 million in total. Or put differently, Google is now being asked to remove well over 18 links to alleged copyright infringing material every second.

Just last week Google received a record breaking 12.5 million reported links in seven days, showing that the surge in notices is still ongoing.

The BPI and RIAA are among the most active senders of DMCA takedown requests. Together, the music groups have sent notices for 5.5 million URLs over the past month, which represents 12% of all requests.

Both groups are topped by takedown agencies Rivendell and Degban though, who are good for reporting 7.7 and 6.3 million URLs respectively.

Over the past month more than 2,600 copyright holders submitted takedown notices, targeting 77,514 separate domain names. The relatively unknown MP3 search engine myfreemp3.re tops the list with nearly a million removed pages, and several Pirate Bay related domains are also among the top targets.

The vast majority of the reported links have been removed, but the takedown notices also include duplicate or non-infringing URLs for which Google takes no action.

Despite the frequent use of the takedown process many copyright holders are not happy with Google’s take on the piracy problem. Groups such as the RIAA and MPAA have repeatedly stressed that the company should do more to prevent pirated content from showing up in the top search results.

Faced with this harsh criticism, Google has gradually altered its search algorithms. October last year the company implemented the most significant change yet, aimed at downranking sites that often link to copyright-infringing material.

Still, the major copyright holders remain far from pleased. They’ve urged Google to completely de-list infringing domains and boost the rankings of legitimate sites. Until that happens, it’s unlikely that we’ll see the number of reported links going down.

TF reached out to Google for a comment on the ever-increasing volume of takedown requests and how the company is able to cope with the surge, but at the time of publication we haven’t heard back.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.