Why the pirate bay ‘block’ won’t work
The High Court has apparently ordered most British ISPs to block access to the Pirate Bay, a website which allegedly hosts copyright-infringing material, as of later this month. They’ve been ordered to do this by blacklisting it on their DNS servers, so the name won’t resolve to its IP address.
The problem is, this is trivially easy to circumvent. In order of increasing technical difficulty, these are the ways round this that I’ve thought of in less than five minutes:
Visit an online DNS lookup service, type the pirate bay’s URL in, copy-and-paste the IP address into your web browser’s toolbar.
Use an online anonymising proxy to visit the site.
Install one of the at least two Firefox plugins I know of that would get around this.
Set up your own DNS nameserver, and have it get its information from OpenDNS (I actually already do this on my own machine, not for nefarious lawbreaking purposes, but because TalkTalk’s nameservers are so awful.
Install TOR (not the publisher, a piece of anonymising network software) and route all your traffic through that.
Note that I am not suggesting anyone actually do any of these things — if nothing else, there are much easier ways of accessing copyrighted material illegally than that — but I’m pointing out that for anyone with enough technical knowledge to use BitTorrent at all (it sounds daft, but a majority of people online now simply don’t have even that level of knowledge), DNS blocking is about as much of a barrier as a sheet of thin tissue paper.
I think when enforcing a law becomes this impossible — and this shows how impossible to enforce the current law is — we need seriously to consider alternatives to that law, rather than having ever-stricter (and ever-more-unenforceable) versions of the law. I don’t know what the solution is to the problem of compensating people for their ‘intellectual property’ in a world of near-instantaneous perfect copying (and it’s a problem I’m keenly aware of — in my day job I’m a software engineer, and I at least attempt professionalism in my writing and my music) but we won’t find it if governments keep looking in the same place…
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