Deny all access to AllOfMp3.com - it's a court ruling

Kim Schulz, thursday d. 26. october 2006

IFPI in Denmark has won a case in the enforcement court today against one of the biggest ISPs in Denmark - Tele2. The ruling says that Tele2 has to deny all of their customers access to the russian music store All of MP3. The reason for this should be that All of MP3 does not pay the artists anything when they sell their music online as mp3.
Is it just me who find this ruling tremendously stupid?
To me this seems like saying that it is the car manufacturers fault that people are speeding - or maybe it is the fault of the state since they own the roads?

How should this at all be possible for Tele2? I got some ideas, but I know for a fact that if a site is online, then it is accessible. here's just a couple of the ideas:

  • change DNS for AllofMp3.com to point to 127.0.0.1
  • ban all traffic to Russia.
  • filter all traffic and find contents that resembles that of allofmp3.com

In most cases this can be bypassed with a simple proxy on another network.

IFPI argue that this is what everyone wants since it locks out the criminal pages on the net and this way it will make it a better place for everyone. But what about freedom? I value that more than not hitting any illegal sites on the net. Don't you?
Another problem is, that the court decision is based on EU-law which could very well mean that IFPI will try to force ISP in other countries in the EU to block access to the site.

More info on about the case here(sorry it is in Danish) : Reference

Update:
Apprently Tele2 has rejected the ruling which is exactly what I hoped for (Danish reference)

If you understand Danish, then you can read the entire ruling here tele2_ke.pdf
It is quite interesting to read since it contains statements by some "network experts" - interestingly enough the say DSN instead of DNS in most of the text. Tells me that they know nothing about what they are talking about.

Update2:
Here's a reference for the german readers: German reference

Update3:
An finally here's an English reference about this: English Reference



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