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[webmaster AT blockaid.me]

I'm a lawyer myself and as far as I can tell, what we're doing is perfectly 
legal. The advantage is that its a very grey area, legally speaking. 

From what I have managed to work out, as long as you agree to join the 
service voluntary it is fine. Otherwise you can fall foul of various laws. 
For example, there is nothing stopping you editing your own hosts file to 
make google.com point to localhost. But if you do it to someone else without 
their consent, that is likely to be considered illegal.

You also have to remember that providing a dns service is not the same as 
operating a proxy. You are technically not providing people with the ability 
to access sites (that is for their isp's), just pointing them in the right 
direction. I think of a dns as a collection of road signs. The roads allow 
you to access the destination.

That being said, I understand your position and the need to tread carefully. 

Apologies for the spelling mistakes, this was typed on my phone.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Koontz <brian AT opennicproject.org>
Sender: discuss-request AT lists.opennicproject.org
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2012 11:56:48 
To: <discuss AT lists.opennicproject.org>
Reply-To: discuss AT lists.opennicproject.org
Subject: Re: [opennic-discuss] European domain seizures

On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 01:40:56PM +0000, Web Master wrote:
> That's exactly what we do at BlockAid. We have the ability to detect when
> domains are seized and then circumvent the seizure where necessary.

We (OpenNIC) need to tread carefully here.  It's one thing to continue
to resolve an OpenNIC domain that points to a site which has had its A
record changed in ICANN-space.  It's an entirely different story to
purposefully create an OpenNIC A record (or modify ICANN-space A
records as they are returned) to circumvent a seized domain.  

If OpenNIC chooses to be a test case to determine if cirumventing a
domain seizure is against (US) law or not, there needs to be
infrastructure put in place that would force the law to treat OpenNIC
as any other corporation and to shield (to the extent possible)
individual T2 operators.  I've always advocated creating some sort of
legal structure for OpenNIC and then encouraging T2 operators to
register their WHOIS information under OpenNIC's name.  Nothing
different than registering under a WHOIS anonymous proxy.

BTW, have no doubts that there are subscribers to this list with a
vested interested in what we do.  

  --Brian

-- 
OpenNIC (the sequel) co-founder and wikimaster
IRC: Freenode.net channel #opennic


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