Belgian Court Order May Be Too Specific To Actually Block Pirate Bay Domain

bs0d3 writes "Recently, many people from Belgium have been joining The Pirate Bay's and Telecomix's IRC channels, asking for help with the Telecomix DNS, saying that it doesn't work to access www.thepiratebay.org. This is true. The court was very specific in its order, which was to block the domains www.thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.com, www.thepiratebay.nu, www.thepiratebay.se, www.piratebay.no, and www.ripthepiratebay.com, or else face a daily penalty of 1000 EUR for every day when defendants do not implement such 'DNS-blocking' in their DNS-servers'. So, obviously in defiance of that, people testing their DNS servers go to the domain www.thepiratebay.org — except, thepiratebay doesn't have the www domain turned on. At one point it redirected to the main page, at the URL thepiratebay.org; now it doesn't, probably because of negligence from the admins. What's interesting is that the court only ordered the block of the www subdomains, so if an ISP wants to make a fuss they should be able to avoid the penalties until a later ruling."

Comments

Don't bother clicking TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother clicking on TFA, it's the exact same thing that's in the summary, no more content, no less content.

Alternative domain for Belgians

[hydrofix]

The Pirate Bay has also already registered a domain specifically for those in Belgium, to work around the censorship order. http://depiraatbaai.be/ (Flemish Dutch for "The Pirate Bay")

This is not listed in the domains the court ordered to be blocked. TorrentFreak has the full story.

Re:Classic problem restated

[TaoPhoenix]

I might disagree.

In the US we're getting so many blatant Constitution-demolishing new politics/cases that they're not even trying to follow the law anymore. Yet the 1960's age of Civil Disobedience is/almost over.

So the only form of protest left is to use the Letter/Spirit of the law. Because the Spirit of the law is "Let's let a measly 10-Billion Industry completely dominate all of world politics!" So when the smart users find a loophole, it's the only way they can't be slammed with the Terrorist label.

Re:Classic problem

[martin-boundary]

Thanks, I was going to point this out too. Belgium uses civil law which is very different from the English common law that Americans have copied. What a Belgian judge decides cannot be meaningfully interpreted as a precedent in American terms.