After the Pirate Party proxy to the popular torrent search engine Pirate Bay was shutdown last week, this has resulted in nothing but blooming of several other proxy sites causing a ceasefire to the action taken for the Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay block was done by the British Pornographic Industry (BPI). Later then, Pirate Party UK provided a proxy server that allowed UK users to access TPB, but the BPI would have none of that and moved to have the proxy server taken down.

Anyways, the action cease fired on BPI as this resulted in surfacing up of new proxies, as several pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have decided to start fresh Pirate Bay proxies. These parties have started their own Pirate Bay proxies (ARG / LUX), sending a clear message to the copyright lobby. In fact, they also released support statements for the Pirate Bay.

“Due to pressure from lobbyists, politicians all over Europe are incited to expand the censorship infrastructure to prevent freedom of expression, the right to information and the free exchange of culture. With our proxy, we help to circumvent the Internet censorship of European countries,” Luxembourg Pirate Party President Sven Clement says.

“We wish the UK Pirate Party best of luck in their continued fight for free access to culture and knowledge. We have put up our own Pirate Bay proxy which is accessible from anywhere in the world, including the UK and other places where it has been censored,” said the Argentinian Pirate Party.

More and more, Internet users are starting to discover that their activities online can be interrupted or interfered with by government entities. The worst is when ISPs are called upon by governments (or simply just industry moguls) to take action against users by curtailing their ability to do what they desire online. Sometimes this would lead to less copyright infringement; but numerous users actually use BitTorrent trackers for legal purposes as do many distributors.

“As a result of shutting down proxies, calling upon ISPs to block certain websites, and other nefarious interference, the youth of today are starting to see the benefit of proxies and VPN,” says HackANGLE editor Kyt Dotson. “We’ve seen a rise in the use of VPNs in order to connect to websites, an increase in the number of people enabling higher levels of security to do everyday things. In countries such as China, we’ve seen their government move to block these technologies as well with an encryption-sensing firewall added to their Great Firewall of China. The era is coming where the race between users seeking to remain private online is going to butt up against snooping regimes rising out of copyright cartels in the US and UK as well as those seeking to extinguish free speech such as China.”

While the Streisand effect might be less when it comes to proxies, the nature of networks enabling people to do what they’d like on the Internet is an easy fix. Although there might need be a vetting period for the trustworthiness of those proxies–they could easily be used as fronts for sting operations against credulous individual users. Although, since actively using BitTorrent itself cannot be a crime is why copyright industry movers have been more effective in getting ISPs and governments to suppress trackers than they have to stop the protocol.