The Pirate Bay news: TPB Survives Another Shutdown But Warning Goes Out To UK Users

Get It Right

After facing a temporary shutdown last month, file sharing website The Pirate Bay is back but authorities are issuing warnings to people who use it and other similar torrent websites.

The Pirate Bay faced more than 12 hours downtime last month as it temporarily shut down due to a Cloudflare error, but was still accessible through its onion address using the Tor Browser, TorrentFreak reported. Shortly after, the popular piracy website went back online.

Now, a new campaign backed by authorities in the U.K. has Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, sending warning messages to those who would attempt to use the piracy site, Express reports. The campaign, Get It Right, aims to inform people about legal sources of the content they want to download, so that the illicit sharing of copyrighted material, whether music or movies, among others, will be reduced.

In its website, Get It Right says people who love to watch, listen, play, or read material from their favorite artist will do well to support their work by accessing it through legitimate websites. By supporting what they love, the public actually motivates these artists to do more of what they do.

When they access it through illegal file sharing websites like TPB, Kickass Torrents (KAT), Torrentz, ExtraTorrent, or other proxy domains, they are actually doing nothing to help the artist produce more of what they do. They simply end up violating copyright infringement laws.

U.K. ISPs that have signed up for the campaign, such as Sky, BT and Virgin Media, send warning messages to those who use The Pirate Bay every time they access it. Those who are subscribed to TalkTalk, on the other hand, will receive warning messages at the end of the month.

Still, The Pirate Bay is able to operate as of now, and is actually warning its users to hide their IP address before trying to download any content.  Its staff members believe they are doing nothing wrong, saying they cannot be legally charged because they do not keep any copyrighted content in their servers.