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BT Blocking Pirate Bay; Claims It's Part Of A Voluntary Self-Regulation Code
from the say-what-now? dept
Slashdot points us to the news that BT is blocking its mobile broadband subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay, claiming that it's a self-regulation effort in order to remain in "compliance with a new UK voluntary code." It appears to have something to do with the already controversial self-censorship program being managed by the Internet Watch Foundation, which has already blocked access to parts of Wikipedia and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. At what point do people realize that any such demand to "block" certain types of content will overblock and harm perfectly legitimate sites and technologies?
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More importantly, at what point will they realize attempts to block content is largely futile?
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ahh yes.. an encrypted proxy or vpn should help get around this.
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It will do a good job stopping people who wouldn't have gone anyway.
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And like Mike likes to point out, bring the issue to people's attention who otherwise would not have known about piratebay at all.
And to answer this question "At what point do people realize that any such demand to "block" certain types of content will overblock and harm perfectly legitimate sites and technologies?"
- We all know that's a trick question. The day people in charge realize they need to give themselves less control is the day the sky falls and hell freezes over.
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That's ok, I sure a lot of customers will respond by blocking the flow of their money to BT.
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WTF? Are we in China?
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Wouldn't these companies be better off blocking child porn rather than worry about who is using bandwidth to do this and that.
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It's their phorm
As in, it's ok for BT to break any laws like using Phorm to spy on its users without their consent but we're going to 'protect' our users from themselves.
Having said that, TPB is still accessible thru my BT broadband.
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Actually i think that this is clearly just a way to reduce/cap bandwidth just for the mobile users. They aren't dumb, you know.
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Not the IWF
While the block page apparently directs you to the IWF site, according to The Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/21/iwf_pirate_bay/ the IWF themselves are claiming that it's nothing to do with them, and a BT spokesperson confirms that the IWF link only directs users to documentation on a code of practice they claim to be following.
I smell a lot of deliberate misdirection by the ISPs on this story.
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Bt blocking websites
If you came to my restaurant and paid say 50£ for dinner, but I decided I won't serve you the potatoes, because they would make you ill and this would break the law, would you still pay 50£ ?? would you be happy and come back again??
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