​France bans file-sharing site The Pirate Bay

France has become the latest country to block world's number one file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, in an effort to defend copyright-protected content.

The ruling of the Grand Instance Court of Paris, published in IT magazine Numerama on Friday, ordered the country’s leading internet providers, including Orange, Bouygues Télécom, Free and SFR, to ensure “all measures are put into place to prevent access (to the site) from French territory”. In addition to the main site address, the court banned around 20 mirror websites and 50 proxy servers that allow users to download content from the Swedish site.

Now internet service providers have 15 days to prevent access to the file-sharing site, which some 28.7 percent of people in France visited at least once a month last year, according to anti-piracy group Alpa.

The court ruling follows legal action by the anti-piracy group La Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques (SCPP), which represents some 2,000 music labels that brought the request before the court this year.

In a statement, SCPP said they were “thrilled” by the decision, saying it represents a new step in fighting illegally downloaded content.

“This decision is another step in the fight against music piracy and one that strengthens existing similar decisions in the EU and worldwide,” SCPP said in a statement.

The Pirate Bay rose to prominence – and notoriety – since hitting the web in 2003. It allows users to share music, films and other files using bit torrent technology, which distributes content through a series of peer-to-peer connections.

While the technology and the website are used to share some content legally, there is also a large amount of copyright-protected material distributed this way. The Swedish co-founders of The Pirate Bay have all been sentenced to various jail terms and ordered to pay a fine of $6.1 million for copyright violations.

Read More:Last of Pirate Bay founders arrested on Laos-Thailand border

Music and video industries worldwide continue to claim that The Pirate Bay is responsible for facilitating grand scale copyright infringement. Over 30 countries, including the UK, Italy and Denmark have blocked access to The Pirate Bay.

The attempts to legally shut down the site itself however have failed so far, so copyright groups appear to have opted for having access to the site blocked in respective countries instead.

The effort is not limited to the level of court injunctions and government action. For instance, Google this week removed a number of Android apps from its Google Play store that allowed browsing the website from mobile devices and use proxies to circumvent the blockade of the site, according to a Torrent Freak report.

Earlier the US tech giant altered its search algorithm to downrank sites with links to copyright infringing material.