P2P Foundation website blocked at US Public Library

Et tu, public library?
Floren Cabello (fcabello@ uma .es)

“SOPA is dead. PIPA is dead. ACTA is dead….” (@KitDotcom).

No doubt this July 4th will be difficult to forget for all the people around the world who have joined efforts to denounce ACTA and force its rejection at the European Parliament. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of these seemingly dead laws that manage to survive them.

Spending some months in a research stay in Troy (NY), I have bumped into one of these zombies: the indiscriminate use of DNS block of websites in public libraries. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Public Library of Troy: designed in the American Renaissance style, this beautiful building is managed by a nice and careful staff and offers lots of interesting materials, courses, workshops, as well as an open wireless networks.

The problem, as usual, has to do with the network administration policy, blindly devoted to the “protection” of copyright and the persecution of p2p filesharing practices. How did I discover this? Well, it could be funny if it were not so perturbing: I was looking for the definition of “Free/Libre knowledge” and thought it could be easily found at one of the reference webpages in this area, the P2P Foundation site. But when I typed the url (http://p2pfoundation.net) and clicked “Enter”, here is the message I received:

It seemed that the DNS filter of the library must have detected the term “p2p” in the url and immediately associated the site with copyright infringement, preventing the general public to visit it. Although this public-driven DNS block will surely affect many other useful sites (such as media search engines, even if they essentially do the same Google does), it is highly worrying that public libraries accept to extend this restrictive policy a step further, censoring an investigative webpage just because they happen to have chosen the wrong name for it.

I really hope this post can help solve this mess. Until then, my search for “Free/Libre knowledge” will remain unaccomplished.

 

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