The Polish domain registrar has decided that the Torrentz domain shouldn't be blocked

May 27, 2014 11:57 GMT  ·  By

A day after getting suspended by the registrar following a request from the City of London Police, Torrentz.eu has been unblocked.

The site’s registrar from Poland restore the domain name’s DNS entries after the legal team stepped in and pointed out that the suspension was unlawful because there was no court order attached to the request from the Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

Nazwa, the Polish company that’s responsible for the suspension, took the drastic step without thinking much about it, same as other domain registrars have done in the past when receiving the same type of request, Torrent Freak reports.

The City of London Police demanded that ISPs block access to a bunch of torrent sites in the past and many of them complied, without realizing that it was a mere friendly request and that they weren’t legally obliged to comply. In fact, one Canadian ISP stood up to the authorities at the time, saying that a court order was needed and that an email sent by some guy on the Internet wasn’t going to cut it for them.

This morning, the Torrentz.eu’s old DNS entries were replaced, meaning that it should once again be possible to access the address. If there are still issues for some users, they can access Torrentz via the other domains, namely Torrentz.ch and Torrentz.me, which continue to work just fine.

While the registrar hasn’t issued a formal response so far, it seems like they’ve acknowledged the mistake.

What’s more, the British police doesn’t seem to feel bad for fooling yet another domain registrar. In fact, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit told the publication that the move was part of “Operation Creative,” where rights holders in the creative industries identify and report websites that infringe on their copyright.

The officers explained that after an investigation is completed, the website accused of illegal activities is contacted and offered the chance to engage with the police and correct their behavior. Basically, they can go legal or suffer the consequences.

“If a website fails to comply and engage with the police, then a variety of other tactical options may be used including; contacting the domain registrar informing them of the criminality and seeking suspension of the site and disrupting advertising revenue through the use of an Infringing Website List (IWL) available to those involved in the sale and trading of digital advertising,” the police said.

It should be mentioned that nowhere in the statement is a court order mentioned, which is the only legal way to oblige a registrar to suspend the domain of a website. Instead of going to court, this division of the British police would rather try to fool others into believing that their requests need to be respected.