Copyright Law

US ISP Blocking the Pirate Bay?

By soulxtc

Qwest customers complaining of being unable to access the Swedish BitTorrent tracker site.

The Qwest forum over at DSLReports is abuzz with reports that the US ISP is preventing customers from accessing Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay.

A user by the name of Sky was the first to report the following:

Tracing route to thepiratebay.org [192.121.86.15]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms whitebox [192.168.1.254]

2 75 ms 76 ms 30 ms *.ptld.qwest.net [207.*

]

3 ptld-agw1.inet.qwest.net [207.225.86.9] reports: Destination net unreachab

le.

Trace complete.

It was the same for almost a dozen other Qwest customers.

Sky later chatted with Qwest’s tech support to find out what was going on.

He posts:

Tech Mike > It may be an issue with the site itself as in testing we are not able to reach that site through multiple routes. Also due to the nature of the content on that site Qwest is not able to assist with attempts to connect to that particular site even though we do not block access to the site through the network our security department does monitor traffic to those types of sites and will suspend accounts that download files that re copyrighted material.

Me > How do you explain that this issue appears specific to the qwest network?

Me > »Qwest blocking thepiratebay.org? [...]

Tech Mike > Again we have tested connectivity to that site through multiple routes and are not able to reach the site either. If our network is unable to get a response from that server then our network will advise it is unable to reach it, so that may be why it is coming up that way. I apologize but if that is not something I can assist you with as that server is not with in our network to be able to isolate why it is not responding.

Me> Can I quote you on that?

Tech Mike > what quote would you like to use. that we have tried to isolate the issue within our network and are unable to resolve the issue you are having due to the fact that the site is not within our network =and is out of our support ability, or the fact that you we will not help you further with access to a site that allows you to download illegal content through torrent files that is copyright protected? [...]

You have to love his sarcasm, though he still fails to fully answer the question.

It may just be some sort of technical glitch on Qwest’s part for ISPs have yet to begin blocking websites accused of copyright infringement by rights holders without a court order.

If it is actively blocking the Pirate Bay then it should do so with caution for it’s sure to cause many to switch ISPs.

“If Qwest decides to censor the web then I’m switching to a new provider,” in fact writes user UHF.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on August 03, 2009 (boomark / email).