It's Official: Australian ISPs Will Be Forced To Block The Pirate Bay And Other Torrent Sites

The Federal Court has ordered Australian internet service providers (ISPs) to block five torrent websites, including Pirate Bay and TorrentHound, within 15 business days. Here's what you need to know.

Foxtel and Village Roadshow filed the case to block a number of popular torrent websites that are often used to illegally download copyright content back in February. These are the five websites that will be blocked:

  • The Pirate Bay
  • Torrentz
  • TorrentHound
  • IsoHunt
  • SolarMovie

Australian ISPs including Telstra, Optus, TPG, M2, Dodo and iiNet have to comply with the court order within 15 business days. ISPs can use DNS blocking, IP address blocking, URL blocking or any other technical method (so long as the rights holders are happy with it) to do this but Foxtel and Village Roadshow will be footing the bill; they will have to pay $50 to the ISPs for every domain that is blocked. They also have to pay the ISPs' legal costs.

Once a website is blocked, users who visit them will be hit with a landing page that warns them that the site cannot be accessed.

If there is a silver lining to all of this, it's that the Federal Court has noted the decision does not allow rights holders to add new websites to the block list willy nilly. Foxtel and Village Roadshow will need to seek approval from the court for each new website it wants to block.

There are also ways to get around site-blocking through the use of VPNs, but Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke isn't too worried about that. According to the ABC, he said:

"The experience overseas is not many people use VPNs because they cost money as well. [A torrent website user would] still face the issue of dealing with viruses, scams and a pretty terrible, terrible neighbourhood so I think that should factor, but I think also when we explain to people that it's not a victimless crime, that other people lose their jobs, I think that will have an impact. So I don't see that as significant. I think we can address that."

Read Next: How To Bypass ISP Blocking Of The Pirate Bay And Other Torrent Sites For Free



    I feel like the clocks been turn't back and I'm watching the take down of Napster all over again.

      Just change your DNS to Google's DNS servers (easy fix)

      DNS 1:
      DNS 2:

    Is that $50 to add each domain to the list, or $50 every time a request for a page on a blocked domain is refused? If it's the latter, it seems like it'd be cheaper to just let people pirate @[email protected]

      $50 for every domain name/IP address that's blocked (and by the sounds of it/lack of information, they can't refuse to block a site).
      So submitting a request to block,,,,,, to 32 of the main service providers in Australia would cost the rights holder $11,200 to block just one site.
      Now times that by the number of torrent sites there are out there and the large number of URL's that each site has (and can easily register) it has the potential to become very expensive, very quickly for the rights holders.

    are they talking about DNS or the IP address of the site being blocked? Last attempt at this cause sh*t load of issues when the IP addresses hosted lots of other valid web sites!

      From my understanding of the article we just read, the choice of blocking method is up to the ISP.

      ISPs can choose the blocking method they want to use so long as the rights holders are happy with it.

      Hope this helps!

    Time to decide whether it's VPN time or usenet time. Anyone wanna chime in?

      First rule of Usenet ...

        If you're not taking the piss and genuinely think not talking about usenet is going to allow usenet to fly under the radar, you're sorely mistaken :/

        Usenet is already well and truely on the radar, but tackling that issue would be a lot harder than these proposed "solutions".

        Baby steps for the government.

      well you can use a VPN for other things too like... safe guarding your privacy, geo dodging youtube... or going to China

      I know someone that uses usenet and they found it not really reliable, but I imagine it's just depends on who you're with (I use a VPN personally)

        Been using usenet for years. Its definitely the way to go. Do people still use torrents?
        Foxtel & Village Roadshow are just wasting the courts time & their money.
        This wont do a thing.

          I only pirated Westworld, and I did that because I hate Foxtel's pricing structure. As someone who works 5 days a week between 10 to 11 hrs each day and 2 Saturdays a month, I find Netflix, Stan and just plain old recording free to air TV to perfectly fit my entertainment needs

          I buy movies, TV shows and music online (mostly iTunes) and I have more games then spare hours to play them.

          honestly regardless of what people use to pirate content, the scheme is pointless anyway imo. time and time again surveys (if not direct results like netflix being available) have shown that if there are legal decently priced sources of content, people will use them.

      More like Tor time..

      Google a little browser extension called Hola. Works a charm for geo-dodging on Livestream (free NRL!) and is completely free, although they have had some issues in the past which appear to be largely resolved.

        Those issues are not resolved. they still use your comp in a botnet and onsell your info and usage statistics to third parties. Avoid them like the plague

        This is bad advice. Don't use Hola.

      Went down this road a few years ago...
      Usenet is fucking great! 256 bit AES encryption on multiple download streams (10-20 works nice) YOU WILL HIT MAX SPEED almost everytime. BUT and this is a big hair butt.
      Like torrents it relies heavily on indexers (like torrent trackers) and these in themselves cost money too (the good ones oznzb ,etc) It's not much but when you factor in usenet access fee's it adds up. The very worst part is the DMCA's. Most indexers comply very quickly with DMCA's so unless you you snatch it up quick the indexer might not even show that TV ep you're trying to download. So there are pro's and cons to both. I just found torrent trackers more reliable than the indexers. anyone else have thoughts?

    Is the landing page under ISP control?
    The ISPs could shove some google ads on it and make a fortune.

    They'll just open other websites, shrug

    Step 1. Download Tor
    Step 2. Open Tor
    Step 3. Nothing! Browse any site like normal

      Don't use Tor for torrents. They even say that specifically on their site.

        A Torrent file is 20kb so I doubt they would mind you using the Tor network to access TPB to download Torrent files.

        That warning is to stop you running your BitTorrent client through the Tor network.

        Tor is fine for downloading the torrent file. Not for downloading the torrent itself. We arent morons.

    Inevitably they will be playing a game of whack-a-mole as the content on dedicated sites will often pop up on a different address via mirrors and proxies. And of course, there is always Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) like PureVPN ( or Ivacy ( which shield an internet users location.

      Thanks shitty spam bot. Ill be sure to never use those websites.

    Within 15 days to block them
    On the 16th day access them again under a new domain / IP etc
    They won't succeed in blocking them that easily

    Last edited 16/12/16 8:49 am

    Meh. Window dressing. Anyone who torrents will already have the know how to bypass this trivially.

    And most people, honestly, should already be using those methods to avoid metadata being scooped up by Mr Brandis, our Attorney General.

    I don't know why the govt. would get involved in blocking torrent sites. What do they get out of it besides looking a bit silly?

      Hundreds of thousands of dollars of cold hard lobbying cash.

      Just in these two years, Village Roadshow made donations to the Liberal party in excess of half a million dollars:

      Which if nothing else should be raised as a huge conflict of interest when agreeing to implement legislation like this.

        Yep. But the Labor Party, especially under Conroy, were no better.

        Let us control and police the internet between us Barry.
        Yes we must do that Jim. One step at a time though, eh?
        Yes, I know how it works, Bazzy, I am in the Government, you know.
        We must make it our business to control of all of the little people and their tiny brains.
        Look, what, are you explaining the plot to me are you? No one's listening.
        Hope not Jim.

    Yes, but there's now a law, a court to go to, ISP's have been brought to heel, the community expects it, and the users respect it or, at least, they consider the new blocking the new 'normal'.

    For Government or private companies, if they have the money to pay, to go to a court and have sites they don't like or which provide content which inconveniences them blocked, with us no right to appeal, nor access anything--that's just normal.

    Do ordinary Australians have the right to appeal any block? Who presents the case for access in these hearings?

    Sux about torrents but impact is minimal since im 90% of my Buccaneering is done via IRC or HTTPS, torrents were just 'convenient' to me.
    This 'blanket' law reminds me of the car/turbo/power restrictions they did for young drivers.

    Funny, isn't this what iiNet were saying all along? We'll block if the legal system tells us to, but the rights holders were campaigning against even that oversight? Now it's enshrined in law that the court has to do the oversight and the rights holder has to pay.

    So if I was running a torrent site - and I don't - I would code up something to change my IP every few days and/or my DNS name. Then see how long it would take Village Roadshow etc to realise $50 a time to block my old IP is going to add up real quick.

    So a really expensive game of whack a mole.

    hollywood solved the piracy issue a long long time ago: they haven't made anything worth pirating

    Similarly, got across this blog: . They too are offering to provide access to Pirate bay and other torrent sites in Australia.
    I just have one thing to say, people who do torrent are in no way going to stop doing it. They need a solution VPN, DNS or any other may be Opera. But it is quite difficult to stop the use. Unless the government decides someday to ban these vpn or dns services as well.

    Does anyone know if this is going to effect the Kodi box?


    ha...haha...ahahahahahhaha!!! Most people over-sea's dont get censored the living bajeebus out of, simply because a few companies decide to whine and moan!.

    North Korea is the largest country of VPN users... why? Censorship.

    What you DONT expect is going to happen, or dont BELIEVE is going to happen... is happening.

    1: The way the AU Federal court has gone to block the sites is laughable, to say the least. Simply by changing the Primary and Secondary DNS to and respectively in ones router settings, one can bypass the DNS Poisoning block entirely.

    2: What doe this mean for the future?

    What are the AU government's plans? It starts with attempts to block piracy sites, what's next?

    Blocking all adult content?
    Blocking anything representing views critical of the Australian Federal and State Governments, or any of their international bedfellows?

    This could be the tip of the iceberg, DNS poisoning is easy to bypass, but what does the future hold?

    Are they going to censor and track Social Media, so they can arrest anyone speaking their mind against any future crazy policies from the Australian Federal and State Governments?,

    Are they going to push to make it impossible for Australian Citizens to purchase anything in the global market, forcing them to pay 4 times as much, for being Australian, by making it a criminal offense to pay rest of world prices?

    Could they change laws making it illegal for ordinary civilians to subscribe to, or use Smart DNS services and Virtual Private Networks, leaving only big business and government agencies to have any shred of privacy?

    Will the IP addresses of anyone that hits a "This page has been blocked" screen be grabbed, stored and used in individual criminal investigations? If so how will they know they intentionally tried to access a piracy site and weren't redirected by a virus, or malware?

    When is the censorship push going to stop?

    Sorry for sounding conspiracy theory here, but I am genuinely concerned about this.

    Last edited 25/01/17 5:15 pm

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