WordPress proxies under threat

Greenhost, a webhost in the Netherlands has been issued a court order to take down its Pirate Bay proxy, a service that showcased the abilities of the company's plugin ‘Repress'.

Repress was designed as an anti-censorship tool and turns any WordPress blog that uses it into a fully working proxy. It means that for every one that gets shut down by a totalitarian government – or Dutch copyright lobbyist group like BRIEN – many, many others will follow.

Fortunately the plugin is available and though still in an alpha state works well. As of yet BRIEN has not gone after the plugin in and of itself.

However GreenHost is now presented with a quandary: how to respond. Initially it refused the copyright lobby group's demands to remove the proxy, saying it would only do so if a court order was issued. When that happened and the company was threatened with a 1,000 euro a day fine if it did not comply, understandably it removed the proxy capabilities from its servers. Now it can choose whether to fight the removal order or not. As TorrentFreak reports, the Dutch Pirate Party attempted something similar not too long ago and failed; making its case look weaker in the process.

At the very least, the CEO of Greenhost Sacha van Geffen believes that his company should have been contacted as part of the court's decision on whether to issue the takedown order.

Kitguru Says: Court orders that don't even involve questioning those being issued, are tantamount to sentencing someone before they've even been arrested. It's exactly the sort of thing that ACTA and other treaties wanted to implement. Hopefully it isn't the case that the worst parts of those bills are possible with or without them.

Become a Patron!