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.

Re:Don't bother clicking TFA

[Dyinobal]

This is slashdot no one bothers to read the TFA

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

[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.

Re:Classic problem

[xstonedogx]

You should be more disturbed about the American obsession with feudalism.

Re:Classic problem

[dbIII]

could make the case that judges don't generally understand technology, and it would be a valid one

On the other hand this could be the equivalent of a $1 fine because the law says the Judge has to impose some sort of penalty. Somebody of the course of this trial has to have told the Judge that DNS is analogous to the name and number in a phone book but the number is the important thing and can have several names pointed at it. Judges are rarely stupid especially in places where they have to earn the post through merit instead of election - they mostly get portrayed as stupid by those that have a vested interest in reducing the power of Judges (eg. politicians).

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:Classic problem

[Leebert]

If the second amendment grants the right to own a pistol, what about a shutgun? Combat shotgun? Land mines? Loaded bomber plane? Heavy artillary? Missiles? How about a few nuclear weapons?

I personally believe that the 2nd amendment *does* allow me to have nuclear weapons. I also believe that to be insane. However, the answer to that insanity is not to ignore the law, but to modify the amendment to reflect present-day reality.

Re:Classic problem

[richie2000]

Bear. The world is bear.

Word. The word is word.

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:Alternative domain for Belgians

[Arancaytar]

Stupid Sexy Flanders.

fixed

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.

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.