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

Classic problem

[causality]

One could make the case that judges don't generally understand technology, and it would be a valid one. Yet I think this points to a deeper and much older issue.

It's the difference between the "letter of the law" and the "spirit of the law". Obviously the intent was to make the Pirate Bay Web site unreachable. Obviously such an oversight was unintended. Yet the ISPs receive very specific instructions and are only looking after their own financial interests by following them to the letter.

You see the same thing everywhere in the USA, particularly with anything regarding the First and Fourth Amendments. To make up an example, when the pre-Industrial Founders talked about "papers and effects" should that mean "computers and cell phones"? Obviously. Who seriously thinks it wouldn't? They didn't want the government to screw around with private individuals without an evidence-backed good reason and due process. The intent is not difficult to discern. The Founders' notions about the proper role of government are not unknown. Free speech zones, you say? Does anyone really think the likes of Jefferson and Madison wanted the government to easily brush aside those who would speak against it? Why was this ever even a controversy?

The Constitution and most other basic laws are not so difficult to understand. The only reason one needs to be a "scholar" is to find clever ways to play word games so you can twist it around and do what was never intended. It's the same deal with this ruling. The intention is pretty damned clear (too bad one cannot say that about most tax codes). The effect is very much the opposite.

The US is becoming a nation of damned Pharisees. The entire system is run by lawyers whose interests include making law as incomprehensible and inaccessible to the average person as possible. That's how they make themselves indisposable and advance their diabolical profession. I think most nations have gone down this road. I don't live in Belgium but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they were also this way. So we can laugh at this judge who probably looks pretty stupid right now, making rules for what he so clearly does not understand, but the deeper problems it brings up are neither easy to solve nor limited to Belgium.

Re:Classic problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Relying on the spirit of the law is great when the ones interpreting the "spirit" interpret is correctly and don't abuse the system. Unfortunately, there's that whole human thing that gets in the way...

Re:Classic problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You see the same thing everywhere in the USA, particularly with anything regarding the First and Fourth Amendments. To make up an example, when the pre-Industrial Founders talked about "papers and effects" should that mean "computers and cell phones"? Obviously. Who seriously thinks it wouldn't? They didn't want the government to screw around with private individuals without an evidence-backed good reason and due process.

That's an interesting choice of an example, since "effects" includes computers and cell phones -- the letter and spirit agree entirely here, and both are violated with abandon (against ordinary subjects) by the uniformed thuggery, secure in the knowledge that the robed aristocracy will rule in their favor 4 times of 5.

It's not an issue of "letter of the law" vs. "spirit of the law", it's an issue of "the law" vs "law enforcement".

Re:Classic problem

[Charliemopps]

No, there's not. There is no "interpretation" of the constitution. Despite what many would lead you to believe, it's a very literal document and our government is in violation of every single amendment in it. Most teenagers could read it and tell you very directly what's meant and all agree.

But then we get into the realm of "Those guys wrote that thing a long long time ago, they didn't foresee all the stuff we've got to deal with now. They were dumb... old fashion. They didn't know about machine guns! Computers! Satellites!" No... they didn't know about that stuff, but they were not dumb, or old fashion. They were some of the most progressive people of their time. They fostered the most important revolution in human history and then overthrew the most powerful empire on earth with nothing more than farmers.

The best example is the right to bare arms... it's not the right to bare hunting rifles. The reason that amendment is there is so the citizens of the united states could violently overthrow the federal government should they feel the need. The armies of the federal government were never meant to be armed in such a way they could defeat the citizenry. The amendment is there to prevent a military coup.

Another example is the 1st amendment. Which is routinely trampled on for something as simple as "you're blocking traffic"

It's easy, it's only made complicated by those that wish to read something into the document that simply is not there.

Re:Classic problem

[mooingyak]

No, there's not. There is no "interpretation" of the constitution.

Of course there is. One person reads it, and understands it to mean one thing. Another person reads it, and understands it to mean something different and incompatible with the first person's understanding. Clearly one of them is wrong. No matter how direct and literal you strive to be in writing a document, there are always going to be corner cases where the intent is not obvious nor universally seen as one and only one way.

Re:Don't bother clicking TFA

[Dyinobal]

This is slashdot no one bothers to read the TFA

Re:lol DNS blocking

[icebraining]

Why wouldn't one trust someone else to run DNS? It's not like it's difficult to change if they start hijacking NXDOMAINs or censoring.
Besides, most of the censorship has been applied on the root servers themselves due to all the domain seizures by US authorities, so it's not like running your own caching server solves that.