Intellectual Property Law

The RIPE Network Coordination Center, an independent organization involved in high-level internet address allocation, released a video that demonstrating what happened when Pakistan Telecom's attempt to censor YouTube managed to wreak havoc globally on Sunday.

RIPE has more on the situation.

One way to think of this is that the mayor of Censorville, Kansas decided that its residents shouldn't be communicating with the heathens in San Francisco. So he orders the Post Office to block mail to or from San Francisco. The local post office complies by telling its sorting machines to re-route 941xx zip codes to the local dead letter office. But they accidentally publish the new directions, which gets picked up by the the state's main mail sorting office, which shares it with all the other state offices as well.

So now no one in San Francisco is getting letters and the little post office in Censorville is dying under the weight of all of San Francisco's mail, and they can't even find the legitimate mail for their citizens. So they desperately try to reverse the directions and close their doors to the mail trucks suddenly clamoring to offload all the San Francisco mail.

RIPE also has some very cool and free network tools on its site, for those of you who like such things.

• Pakistan's Accidental YouTube Re-Routing Exposes Trust Flaw in Net
• Lights, Camera, Action -- YouTube As Political Storytelling Platform
• Google Unveils YouTube Copyright Filter to Mixed Reviews
• Turkey Formalizes Ban On Sites That Criticize Founding Father
• Turkey Joins China in Internet Tyrant Week Celebration
• Turkey Un-Bans Youtube