The RIAA came up with a rather unusual revelation this week. The music industry group, widely known for its anti-piracy activities, reported that The Pirate Bay started blocking U.S. IP-addresses this year. This is big news, except for the fact that it doesn't hold any water. The Pirate Bay has no idea what the RIAA is referring to and the US remains the top traffic source for the torrent site.
The Pirate Bay is without a doubt one of the most blocked websites around the world.
The first court-ordered blockade against the site was issued in Denmark, more than a decade ago, and dozens of other countries have followed since.
We have come to a point where ‘yet another’ Pirate Bay blockade is hardly newsworthy, but this week something quite unusual appeared on our radar. Apparently, The Pirate Bay itself jumped on the bandwagon by starting to block US visitors, its largest userbase, out of the blue.
This revelation comes from the widely respected music industry group RIAA, which keeps a close eye on the popular torrent site.
A few days ago the group sent its latest overview of “notorious markets” to the US Trade Representative. As usual, The Pirate Bay was prominently featured. It is the single most popular BitTorrent index site in the world, the RIAA says, then adding that for some reason the site no longer accepts American visitors.
“Earlier this year, thepiratebay began blocking U.S. IP addresses. However, the site remains easily accessible using a free proxy service that makes it appear the user is accessing the site from another jurisdiction,” the RIAA writes in its submission to the USTR.
That’s odd, to say the least. While the site has had some (localized) connectivity issues, perhaps due to routing problems, we had never heard of such a blockade. Interestingly, The Pirate Bay team itself has no clue what the RIAA is referring to either.
TorrentFreak reached out to a TPB moderator, who wasn’t aware of any US visitor ban and through a trusted source we learned that the people running the site are not blocking anything.
This makes sense, as we spoke to several people who can still access the site just fine from the US. Also, the United States remains the top traffic source for the site by far, as SimilarWeb data shows. That certainly wouldn’t be the case if US visitors were not allowed.
We have no idea why the RIAA believes otherwise. Perhaps the group was confused by an earlier outage that mainly affected US visitors, but it can be ‘assured’ that this is definitely not intended by the Pirate Bay team.
