Or simply ask the major ISPs to block it. They are already opting into 6 strikes and throttling certain types of traffic (e.g. torrents). It wouldn't surprise me at all if they "voluntarily" (or really, voluntarily) blocked such sites.

This is the exact kind of blocking I was thinking of. Merely blocking the domain would be enough to prevent access from basic users but maybe not knowledgeable pirates, similar to what has happened with The Pirate Bay in the UK and ISP's blocking access to it.

But blocking that domain in the UK did nothing to slow bittorrent traffic, according to several sources. http://torrentfreak.com/censoring-the-pirate-bay-is-futile-i...

Yeah, it was circumvented Pretty quickly. You can't outsmart a pirate. It's a good example of a government trying to restrict what it's citizens can do however, even if it failed the government tried to block access in the first place.

   You can't outsmart a pirate.

You should share that theory with the ones they put in prison and the many they've successfully sued.

It's literally irrelevant if you don't like their results, it's malicious if you encourage others to be ignorant.

>You should share that theory with the ones they put in prison and the many they've successfully sued.

Which are a tiny, microscopic even, minority of people who pirate.

You're right - they haven't figured out how to sue everyone at once so people are indeed outsmarting them by clicking links on TPB proxies!

"You can't outsmart a pirate."

You can't generally bludgeon them with force, you can't outsmart them forever, but sure. People can and do outsmart pirates, it's just rare and those "combatting" usually aren't creative or empowered enough to make the right (er, effective?) decisions.

It's worth mentioning that it was not the UK governmnent that ordered the block; It was a judge (not as bad IMO.)

have they [the US gov't] ever done this for any website?

I can't think of a situation where they've ever needed too. With exception of Antigua and perhaps a few other obscure countries there doesn't appear to be a distance the IFPI's arms don't reach as shown in the Pirate Bay situation and what has happened to its founders and is continually ongoing.

This situation is very much different. They don't have the government in their pockets this time around like all other major copyright cases before them which is why this situation is super interesting.

What about accessing it from outside of US? Can the USA block access to Antigua for Poland? Technically? And politically? I would guess they would rather come to our government and ask it to block Antigua - but even that would generate insane drama.

That said I believe Antigua is just playing it.

The US blocks sites by seizing their domain names and drying up their revenue streams. For example, they could make it illegal for advertising networks to do business with the Antiguan pirate site, enact an embargo of Antigua banning all business with the country, or simply "exert pressure" on payment processors and ad networks to comply.