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Deutsch: Finnischer ISP sperrt The Pirate Bay
On 9 January 2012, the Helsinki Enforcement authority obligated Finnish ISP Elisa to execute the court ruling that it had to block access to The Pirate Bay from its network.
This is the latest phase in an ongoing legal fight between the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and Elisa. Acting on behalf of IFPI Finland, CIAPC brought the case to court in May 2011, and in October the court ruled that Elisa must block access to The Pirate Bay. Elisa has appealed the ruling to a higher court.
The court ruling from October did not specify the domain names and IP addresses that Elisa should block. The Enforcement authority gave Elisa a list of domain names compiled by the CIAPC, including not only domains of The Pirate Bay itself but various translations of the name such as depiraatbaai.be.
One of the listed domain names was piraattilahti.fi ("pirate bay" in Finnish), a website owned by a private Finnish person. The site did not contain any links to or material from The Pirate Bay, but instead hosted a campaign page against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), the controversial US draft bill. The owner of the site changed piraattilahti.fi to point to Effi's web server, with the result that people outside Elisa's network saw Effi's web pages and those inside Elisa got nothing when they entered piraattilahti.fi in their browser. The site was later removed from the blocking list.
Another initially blocked site was piraatti.fi, which is in fact an anti-piracy propaganda site. It was unblocked a few days later.
After the enforcement of the block, the website of CIAPC was flooded offline and CIAPC claimed to have received a bomb threat.
The enforcement raises some questions. First of all, how can a private organisation be empowered to manage a list of websites that people should not be allowed to access - apparently without checking at all what the site actually contains. Furthermore, why such a hurry to enforce a court decision that has been appealed, especially as there is a fresh precedent from the European Court of Justice that basically disallows the Finnish lower court decision.
Elisa's press release (9.01.2012, updated 11.01.2012)
http://www.elisa.fi/ir/pressi/index.cfm?t=100&o=5130&did=17728
EDRi-gram 9.21: Finnish ISP ordered to block The Pirate Bay (2.11.2011)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.21/finnish-isp-block-piratebay
European Court of Justice press release (24.10.2011)
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-11/cp1101...
(Contribution by Timo Karjalainen, EDRi member Electronic Frontier Finland - Effi)