Portugal Called For Nationwide BitTorrent Trackers Block

After similar trials in Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay finds itself involved in a court case in Portugal. The country’s outfit representing the local movie rental companies (ACAPOR), recently filed a complaint with the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. ACAPOR asks to require ISPs block subscribers access to Swedish site The Pirate Bay.

The movie rental association makes an attempt to make sure the Portuguese won’t be able to access the largest torrent site in the world, filing a complaint against The Pirate Bay. The complaint was filed with General Inspection of Cultural Activities, which is actually the part of the country’s Ministry of Culture.

According to ACAPOR, The Pirate Bay alone is responsible for around 15,000,000 unauthorized downloads throughout the country every year. The only way to eliminate the financial damage the film rental companies suffer is believed to be implementation of a Pirate Bay block at all Internet service providers.

The same nationwide block was earlier ordered in Italy. There the long-lasting court battle escalated to the level of the Supreme Court, which decided that BitTorrent tracker websites hosting torrent files are responsible for playing a considerable part in the downloading and uploading behavior of their users.

That was just the first of the three complaints ACAPOR made. Besides, it has also announced an independent case against another website Piratatuga.net, which provides links to different films, games and music songs that are hosted on third party websites. This site accounts for about 50,000 Portuguese visitors per day, which makes it as popular as The Pirate Bay.

Aside from demanding to block both infringing websites, the movie rental association has also asked to identify the owners of the second accused site, Piratatuga.net, to start a criminal prosecution.

Regardless of the outcome of these taken actions, it’s less likely that the film rental companies will be able to achieve the desired goal. All they do is providing Piratatuga.net with the free publicity, which only attracts more visitors to the service. The Italian and Danish stories prove that users will simply find a way to bypass the block and regain access to free downloading.