International Law

Yahoo filters (censors?) the Pirate Bay

Torrent Freak blogs about Yahoo's decision to exclude the Pirate Bay from their search results:

Filtering or blocking the Pirate Bay is beginning to become a trend. Little over a week ago, a Danish court ordered the ISP ?Tele2? to block its customers access to The Pirate Bay. Soon after that the Kuwait government decided to do the same, and now Yahoo is also censoring the Internet.

In response to the news, Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak: ?It?s dangerous to trust a company like Yahoo! when they filter the searches. It?s a new China, but this time Yahoo is the dictator. Yahoo should let the governments decide, not themselves. It?s dangerous when companies take the law into their own hands.?

It seems like The Pirate Bay is the only BitTorrent site that is filtered at the moment. Searches for Mininova and Isohunt are still working fine, Yahoo! even suggests you should try ?mininova torrents?, ?mininova downloads? and ?mininova today downloads?, and more related searches.

It is not clear why Yahoo decided to filter The Pirate Bay, but seems unlikely that they did it because the site is often associated with copyright infringement. Perhaps Yahoo?s index is just screwed up? If we dig a little deeper, it turns out that not all Pirate Bay?s pages are gone.

Interestingly, Yahoo! was found guilty of infringing copyright themselves two months ago. During December last year, Yahoo China?s music search was confirmed illegal in a Beijing court ruling which stated that under new copyright laws it facilitates mass copyright infringement.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).