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…
Linkblogging For 13/02/10
Beatles post tonight, assuming this migraine dies down.
Firstly, while I thought I had reason to be mildly annoyed at Google, at least it didn’t decide I automatically wanted to be bestest friends with an abusive ex and a bunch of people who want to rape me, like it did with someone else… meanwhile Twitter has handed a gift to repressive regimes.
(The first link there has since been turned into a private blog and will not be viewable if you click it. I won’t republish what the author said, but the mere fact that she’s now *had* to close her blog down, as a result of Google’s actions, should say a lot…)
Andrew Rilstone is blogging at a more regular pace again. Here he’s got a short tale about the police, which just might be a metaphor. Mark Steel is less metaphorical on the same subject.
The Mindless Ones have another competition.
Marc Singer continues his run through his comics syllabus with a quick look at Watchmen.
And Justin completely demolishes the government’s response to the Binyam Mohammed case.
And after looking through that list (torture, stupidity, war and abuse) I think my migraine’s worse, not better…
(But this has cheered me up – Cerebus valentines:
Cerebus valentine
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