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ISP Block on Pirate Bay Not Having Desired Effect
TechDirt is reporting that the recent block placed on The Pirate Bay torrent site is not only relatively ineffective, but actually driving more traffic to the site because of the attention. "The news from The Pirate Bay appears to confirm this suspicion. According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block. '...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI,' the blog post reads. 'Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk.' 'We also started tracking some stats before and after the block. There's no noticeable difference between the number of users from Tele2.dk before and after.'"
You are asking the wrong question.
The right question is: Why an ISP claiming to censor and filter is not transparently proxying DNS?
It is the easiest protocol to abuse. A single line NAT entry can do the trick. 99.9% of access equipment out there is capable of doing that. Just add it to the default user profile along with the mandatory web proxy/cache and other similar lines.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I don't use (only) OpenDNS because I don't like being tracked and their search page that pops up when you type a wrong address. I run my own caching name server (dnsmasq) that draws from a pool of DNS servers (OpenDNS too) and I get rid of their stupid search page with This is much faster than using a name server that is not in your intranet and has the advantage that I can give names to all machines in my lan (laptop, xbox, mediacenter, mobile phone...), and if one nameserver goes down or blocks something, there are others in my pool.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
This is only logical, while english is a very common language and a great many people speak it as their second, third language, it is not the most common language.
In europe, most tv-stations, even the commercial ones are man-dated by law to provide a certain amount of "native" broadcasting. That is why the station RTL4 which was clearly aimed at dutch audience spend money on a luxemburg program block in the early hours to satisfy the law (they were based there using a loophole).
Childerens tv in holland has had a strong EU only feel to it in my youth, simply because US programs did not meet EU regs against advertising to childeren.
As for how it is affected, it is not even clear yet how copyright infringement affects hollywood, how it affects local cinema in the rest of the world is anyones guess. We certainly are not going to get the truth about it from the media, they after all have a rather direct intrest in the matter.
So far however it seems to matter little, Remember non-hollywood movies tend not to pay quit as much to their stars. This matters a lot, to pay those idiotic salaries a Tom Hanks gets you need to make massive profits. Pay them a more modest wage and you have a lot more room.
Also what you claim about english content being more easily accepted in the rest of the world helps. I can far more easily find a seeded torrent of a US show then say a belgium program even if said program in the country itself is more popular.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
An article in a mainstream Danish newspaper says that the case is going to court, other ISP's are actually chipping in to fund Tele2's suit against the imposed restriction.
Yes, most "small" language culture (and thus, small languages) is not able to survive in a free (global) market *anyway*, the unauthorized copying is not that much of an issue.
Most "small language" populations are not willing to pay for the true cost of local language culture directly, but are willing to pay indirectly for it through taxes.
The interesting corollary is that since the culture has already been financed indirectly through taxes, there is no reason to attempt to extract direct payment through distribution restrictions (copyright law). By removing the distribution restrictions one would also increase the added value of the culture, as per standard economic theory (the added value is the difference between the price of the product, and the value of the product to the buyer).
It doesn't get much more transparent -- or easier -- than that. Users without an account do not have their DNS requests logged, obviously.
We're running a service used by hundreds of thousands of IT professionals and millions of users around the world -- we can't even keep stats fast enough as it is for the users who want them, let alone deal with everyone else.
-david (CEO and occasional janitor over at OpenDNS)
# Hack the planet, it's important.