Copyright holders celebrated a landmark victory early September when a Norwegian court ordered local ISPs to block the Pirate Bay. A breakthrough verdict perhaps, but one with a major flaw as the rightsholder forgot to list one of the site’s main domain names.
Source: Norway’s Pirate Bay Block Rendered Useless by ‘Mistake’ – TorrentFreak
The Norwegian Pirate Party has made a big statement by launching a free DNS service which allows Internet users to bypass the local Pirate Bay blockade. The party advocates a free and open Internet for everyone and believes that the recent website blockades set a dangerous precedent.
Source: Pirate Party Offers Uncensored DNS to Bypass Pirate Bay Blockade – TorrentFreak
ICANN broke its own bylaws – and acted in a way “fundamentally inconsistent” with its role as the world’s DNS overlord – while restricting efforts to make itself more accountable to netizens.
That striking judgment comes this month from an independent review team at the International Centre For Dispute Resolution (ICDR). The panel said ICANN’s moves to shield two top officials from questioning in a row over the .africa top-level domain “deprives the accountability and review process set out in the bylaws of any meaning.”
DotConnectAfrica (DCA) wanted to run the .africa registry, but it was blocked from doing so by ICANN’s committee of government representatives. DCA has been tussling with ICANN ever since to get the decision overturned, which is why it wants to quiz the two officials – ICANN board member, Cherine Chalaby, and the former head of its Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), Heather Dryden.
(This follows a similar ruling this time last year: in May 2014, ICANN was criticized by the independent team for failing to create a standing committee to hear complaints, again in breach of its own bylaws. And just last month, in a separate case, ICANN was slammed by the ICDR for restricting its ability to provide anything approaching an independent review of the domain-name overlord.)
This time, the ICDR panel has clearly had enough: it has demanded Chalaby and Dryden appear before them next month in Washington DC to answer questions. If they fail to appear, the panel has warned that it will “draw the necessary inferences and reach appropriate conclusions regarding that witness’s declaration.”
ICANN – which wants to completely take over the heart of the world’s DNS from the US government – said it will not send the two to the hearing, scheduled for May 22 and 23, and that any evidence would have to be submitted in advance in writing. In doing so, it quoted from its own bylaws – written by ICANN’s lawyers – to back its position.
(Those handy bylaws were unilaterally written by ICANN staff in response to an earlier review hearing that the organization lost. In that case, back in 2010, ICANN’s decision to block .xxx was challenged, and the DNS overlord was defeated after two of its senior officers were quizzed by an independent panel. Best not let that happen again, eh?)
Last week, a Turkish court ordered an access ban on a single post in the vast sea of more than 60 million individual blogs on WordPress. But for many users, that meant their Internet service providers blocked WordPress entirely.
A lawyer and Turkish Pirate Party member tracked down the root of the sudden ban on all of WordPress: a court order seeking to block a single blog post written by a professor accusing another professor of plagiarism. This post apparently led to several defamation lawsuits and the lawsuits led to a court order basically saying that if blocking the single post proved too difficult, fuck it, block the entire domain.
It is the second sentence in the order, however, that caused the complete ban of WordPress in the country. “If the access to the single page cannot be possible due to technical reasons,” it reads, “block access to wordpress.com.”
