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Internet Piracy 2015

Thousands of reverse proxy sites that provided round-the-way access to blocked file-sharing hubs like The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents have gone missing. The proxies, which mirror a banned site using a new domain, are a common way to circumvent court-ordered blockades of the popular sites in numerous countries.

Now many, but certainly not all, of those proxies are gone. As TorrentFreakdiscovered, the missing proxies appear to be connected to the same pair of sites, ProxyHouse and ProxyAds. The scores of dumped domains are now for sale “by owner,” according to warning messages found on the sites. ProxyHouse is still available — and for cheap.

Other missing domains include the popular piratelist.net, kickasstorrents.nu, piratebay.onl and others.

The list of countries that have tried to block illegal file-sharing sites over copyright concerns is long. For example, The Pirate Bay is no longer operating in places like Australia, France, Italy, Norway and the U.K., but users in those countries can simply turn to an endless supply of proxies to access the same content. When clones are blocked by ISPs, more pop up, making them hard to eradicate.

One way countries have tried to address piracy is going after advertisers. In Russia, another country where Pirate Bay is blocked, the government has launched a “non-traditional” campaign to publicly shame companies that place ads on blocked sites.

It’s unclear why the ProxyHouse proxies — which may have numbered at over 17,000 — disappeared, but legal pressure may have played a role. But as TorrentFreak points out, “there are still enough [proxies] available to bypass most common blockades.”

[Billboard]