Music Industry Pushing For BT To Block Pirate Bay

First time accepted submitter mariocki writes "British music industry body BPI has requested BT block access to Pirate Bay. In response, BT say they will only do so if they receive a court order. But after BT recently lost a court case forcing them to block Newzbin, it looks like it's a case of when — not if — this will happen."

Comments

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[SuricouRaven]

Huh... only filters port 80? Which actually makes perfect sense - it means that BT have achieved the block by simply adding newsbin to the list of websites hosting child pornography, and so repurposed their existing child-porn filter CleanFeed. If they were doing it by a new IP block, they would have blocked all traffic to the IP rather than just port 80. Cleanfield works by redirecting only port 80 to a transparent proxy. Technically elegant - why set up a whole new filtering policy if you already have the infrastructure in place? - but in PR terms a little embarassing, as it serves to validate the claims by CleanFeed's critics that once a convenient censorship system is built, even for a purpose so widely supported as blocking child porn, it's all but inevitable that it will eventually be put to other uses that that for which it was intended.