The music industry just can’t win. TorrentFreak reports that less than 24 hours after Argentina implemented a new blockade for The Pirate Bay following complaints from the music industry’s Argentine Chamber of Phonograms and Videograms Producers (CAPIF), hackers invaded CAPIF’s website and turned it into “a fully functioning and blockade-circumventing Pirate Bay proxy.”
TorrentFreak notes that although retaliatory action in response to blockades and shut downs of torrent sites was once common practice, pirates have been relatively quiet in recent months. The blockade in Argentina is only the latest in an international campaign to end copyright infringement, which has resulted in web blockades all throughout Europe.
For approximately 10 hours on Tuesday, July 1st, any users who attempted to access the CAPIF website at adminlic.capif.org.ar were instead face-to-face with a carbon copy of The Pirate Bay homepage, complete with full access to the torrents within. It took half a day, but the organization finally pulled the proxy and now the website appears to be down altogether.
Whatever this means for the future of activism in response to file-sharing takedowns, it’s clear that the fight isn’t anywhere near finished yet. Argentina will likely recover from this embarrassing stumble, but how long will it be until someone pushes back even harder?
