Microsoft Messenger blocks Pirate Bay links

In the war between online pirates and content producers, it’s pretty obvious which side of the fence Microsoft stands on. The Redmond-based software-giant has started blocking all links to The Pirate Bay in Microsoft Messenger.

According to The Verge, anyone who attempts to send through a link to the renowned file-sharing site is met with a reply saying: “the link you tried to send was blocked because it was reported as unsafe.”

The error message reportedly appears in Microsoft’s native clients as well as third-party tools such as Pidgin or Adium.

The Verge reports, however, that it might not be part of any kind of wide-spread anti-piracy campaign, given that links to other torrenting sites appear to work fine.

The tech news site speculates that it may actually be an attempt to protect users from any “seedy malware” crawling around in The Pirate Bay’s numerous ads.

What cannot be argued, however, is that the site is the number one target in the anti-piracy wars. The repeated attempts by a number of parties to take it down resulted in the site recently announcing an ambitious — some would say foolhardy — project to attach some of its servers to unmanned flying drones. Once it had figured out the technology, it said, it would launch the drones over international waters so that the only way to take the site down would be to shoot them.

Microsoft was a proponent of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was quashed after widespread protests earlier this year.