UK ISPs blocking licenced material

Have you come across The Promo Bay yet? It's a spin-off from The Pirate Bay activities, where artists across a range of endeavours submit their content, willingly and happily, in the hope of being picked up for wider exposure.

Except they're not getting the exposure, in the UK at least, because UK ISPs are blocking them. TorrentFreak reports:

Promo Bay’s Will Dayble believes his site has ended up on some of the ISPs’ blocklists “by accident”.

“These providers are pretty monolithic and old school, I’d imagine it’s just a broad-scale block against a bunch of Pirate Bay properties and we fell under the net. I doubt it’s a pointed move against the Promo Bay in particular,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

But that would imply that blocking - far from being the scalpel-like weapon it's claimed to be - is like a blunderbuss strapped to a hammer.

The Pirate Bay blocking is at the behest of the BPI, who claim to be doing it in the interests of copyright holders. But their block is interfering with other copyright holders' rights to distribute their material as they choose.