Greek court orders ISP blocks on filesharing websites
A Greek court has ordered the country’s ISPs to start censoring sites that allegedly infringe copyright, following in the footsteps of other courts around Europe.
The blockades were requested by music rights organisations against two specific sites and join blockades of controversial BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay in many countries including both the Netherlands and the UK, TorrentFreak reports.
The Athens First Instance Court has handed down a ruling which orders the country’s ISPs to begin censoring a pair of sites the music industry says are infringing their copyrights on a grand scale.
The first site to be censored is Ellinadiko.com, a music sharing forum, and the second is Music-Bazaar.com, a Russian operated and hosted webstore selling MP3s at low prices.
The blocks will be initiated in two ways. ISPs will have to tamper with their DNS records so that subscribers trying to access the sites will be redirected elsewhere and the IP addresses for the sites will be filtered out.
But according to discussion on Greek file-sharing forums, the IP addresses listed in the court order are no longer in use by either site, having been changed a while ago.
Following similar actions taken by the Dutch and UK Pirate parties, the Greek Pirate Party are indicating that they are “ready to implement any lawful technological measure to ensure freedom of communication, speech and exchange ideas online and in society.”
Source: Music Week
