We reported Monday on the UK’s absurd attempt to stop copyright infringement by blocking access to The Pirate Bay. Nobody was going to lose any sleep over the matter since tips on how to get around the blocks went up immediately after the court’s ruling. If anybody thinks the tactic is going to slow down piracy, they’re only fooling themselves and The Pirate Bay has the proof to back it up.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay insider said that the news circulating through all the major news networks like BBC and The Guardian equated to free publicity. They said that The Pirate Bay saw 12 million more visitors than usual after the story started to go live. They even suggested that The Pirate Bay should write a “thank you note” to the British Phonographic Industry, the group who instigated the case that ruled the torrent tracking site to be behind “copyright infringement on a massive scale.”

The Pirate Bay sees this increase in traffic as only a good thing as it will give them time to educate new users how to get around what they see as pitiful efforts by governments to prevent access to their site. Our own Chris Richardson covered the majority of these solutions in his story on Monday. The gist is that users can use free services to change their DNS servers and any censorship is immediately circumvented. There’s also services like Tor and iPredator that help get around such blocks.

I think we can draw a parallel between The Pirate Bay’s very public ISP block in the UK and MegaUpload’s very public takedown. Both sites were very well known and make up a good chunk of Internet traffic. Both sites are hit with some form of censorship that goes very public across multiple news networks. In the case of MegaUpload, file sharing went down immediately after the takedown. Unfortunately for the copyright industry, it went right back to pre-takedown levels the next day after everybody moved on to another service. I’m pretty sure that The Pirate Bay expects the same thing to happen in the UK. Even if they don’t use The Pirate Bay, they’ll figure out a way to obtain the files they’re after.

As TorrentFreak points out, not everybody will be prepared to circumvent the block when it goes into effect. There will be some people who hear about The Pirate Bay and then find out later that it has been blocked. Will they search Google for one of many easy solutions or will they just give up and buy the legitimate product? I think it’s too early to tell, but The Pirate Bay will probably still see plenty of action from UK citizens.

Do you think The Pirate Bay will continue to thrive in the UK? Or will the blockade reduce piracy in the country? Let us know in the comments.