PROTECT IP Act Made Useless

Famous industry observer Drew Wilson started writing a series of guides to explain just how easy it is to bypass the suggested DNS censorship. In fact, the proposed PROTECT IP Act generally exploits DNS censorship among other things. While the rest continue debating philosophically on why the new legislation will do virtually nothing to deter copyright violation, Mr. Wilson went further and decided to make bypassing the law easier.

Actually, things like hiding IP address, using a proxy or the onion router, and obtaining an IP address to a site in order to make it such way that you don’t have to rely on a public DNS server – all of these might appear very intimidating for the unprepared. So probably the newcomers are better to relate to some moderately informed users on these topics.

Undoubtedly, remaining anonymous on the Internet is something that many people can benefit from, particularly those who are being marginalized by their own government in different ways. However, majority of the users have never felt that motivated to exploit any of those tools, because it was an unnecessary layer of security for activities like browsing news and listening to Creative Commons music. But now the suggested PROTECT-IP Act has given them enough motivation to find out how the bypassing methods work mostly due to the arbitrary nature of it all. When Hollywood doesn’t like someone editing a short clip, the entertainment industry can make that whole site disappear. Accordingly, if the Recording Industry Association of America believes that some website doesn’t need to be seen by anyone else, it is also able to erase easy access to that website merely with the snap of their fingers.

That’s how the PROTECT IP Act works: at a technical level, domain name servers are ordered to blacklist the alleged sites. At the same time, despite the fact that the sites remain reachable by IP address, links directing to them appear broken. As for the search engines like already protesting Google, they would be demanded to delete links in their index of the suspected website. Finally, rights owners are given the right to apply for court injunctions to have websites’ domains blacklisted. Therefore, the worst part of this is that DNS servers are affected by the process, because it affects every user using that given server. This gave the opposers of the Act enough motivation to figure out how to make DNS censorship useless and publish the methods online, like we do.