After legal threats from the music industry the UK Pirate Party saw no other option than to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service. However, as is usually the case with censorship, the Internet has found a way to route around it.

Pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have been closely following their colleagues in the UK and as result have decided to spring into action. The parties have now started their own Pirate Bay proxies, sending a clear message to the copyright lobby.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of Pirate Bay blockades was previously highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

According to the researchers this may have been caused by the loss of word-of-mouth promotion by people who used the popular file-hosting site to share movies.

Comparing box office revenues before and after the Megaupload raids shows that overall box office revenues went down. The effects are small, but consistent across different sample designs when taking into account factors such as inflation, Internet penetration and the popularity of Megaupload in each country.

The researchers therefore believe that their findings may support the notion that piracy can act as promotion. Those who pirate movies may talk about them to friends, who unlike them do pay for movie tickets.

The unexpected revival of the tracker is the first sign of life in weeks and suggests that the Demonoid team is working to bring the full site back online. While the index and forum remain offline, the many thousands of torrents tracked by Demonoid have been brought back to life.

While the news of the revived tracker will delight many Demonoid users, it may take some time before the site itself returns, if that’s the plan. In 2007 and 2009 Demonoid suffered similar downtime episodes and at the time the tracker reappeared several weeks before the site.

"I have instructed my departments... to immediately suspend the site www.me.ga," announced Communication Minister Blaise Louembe, saying he wanted to "protect intellectual property rights" and "fight cyber crime effectively".

The minister said an investigation by his staff had found the site was set up to redirect traffic to another site hosted in France that would provide access to shared files.

The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files could "compound the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation."

"It makes little sense for the MPAA, or MegaUpload, or Carpathia, or even the government -- despite its actions otherwise -- to prevent third parties access to their legal property," Julie Samuels, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET this afternoon.

According to the prosecutor it is not against the law to share copyrighted works for personal use, and an IP-address is not enough evidence to identify a person.

Wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Piracy is Illegal”, the movie industry sponsored anti-piracy group ACAPOR delivered several boxes full of IP-addresses of alleged ‘illegal’ file-sharers to the Attorney General’s Office last year.

The prosecutor adds that the right to education, culture, and freedom of expression on the Internet should not be restricted in cases where the copyright infringements are clearly non-commercial.

Last December, we wrote about a report put out by the Swiss executive branch noting that, based on their research, it appeared that unauthorized file sharing was not a big deal, showing that consumers were still spending just as much on entertainment, and that much of it was going directly to artists, rather than to middlemen.

That list doesn't come out for a bit, but there's another, similar list, put out by the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (yeah) that has added Switzerland to its "bad countries" list along with China, Russia and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, both Spain and Canada -- who passed legislation very much at the behest of American interests -- were removed from the evil part of the list and switched to "in transition."

Dotcom previously announced that he planned to bring Megaupload back to life, and new information suggests that this may happen rather quickly. In an update this weekend he tweets that most of the work on the second incarnation of the site is already done.

According to Dotcom we can expect a Megaupload with an even greater range of applications than just file-sharing. While developers of file managers are being encouraged to get in touch for early API access, Dotcom is also calling out to those involved in email and fax tools, VOIP and video apps.

Those looking for a U.S. connection to the raid won’t be disappointed – a source in the country’s Interior Ministry says that the action was scheduled to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky’s trip to the United States.

But while Demonoid’s servers are in custody, the site’s admin does not appear to be. The ColoCall source would not say who is behind the site, only that its management is located in Mexico. The devil may yet be back….

A major UK internet service provider (ISP) said peer-to-peer (P2P) activity on its network returned to just below normal only a week after the measures were enforced earlier this year.

"We saw a fall at the time of the block," the source said, "made more dramatic by the increasing amount of such traffic in the weeks leading up to it.

"But volumes are already pretty much back to where they were before."