The New York Public Library is a bastion of public information and knowledge. While this may be true "on paper", the library has a surprisingly restrictive Internet filter. The result is that many websites are censored in NYPL's network, including The Pirate Bay and, curiously enough, TorrentFreak.

With close to 53 million items the New York Public Library (NYPL) is one of the largest libraries in the world.

Pretty much every piece of information imaginable is available, on paper that is. Ironically, the library’s Internet access is rather restricted and blocks access to many legitimate websites.

One of the main reasons U.S. libraries have to limit access to Internet resources is the Children’s Internet Protection Act. This law prescribes certain schools and libraries to censor obscene and harmful material. The reality is, however, that the filters in place also take down a lot of other content.

The Pirate Bay is one of the sites that is blocked by NYPL. While this would make sense because of the adult nature of some of the ads, the reason for blocking the site is because it falls into the “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing category’.

Aside from The Pirate Bay, other BitTorrent sites such as RuTracker, KAT.ph and What.cd are blocked on the network. Similarly, seemingly harmless websites for BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, Vuze and Transmission are unavailable as well.

Even TorrentFreak.com is made unavailable to NYPL patrons because our website is associated with file-sharing, based on Websense’s blocking software. Users who try to access the site will see a blocking notice, or incidentally a blank page.

Sorry, blocked

A spokesperson for the library confirmed to TorrentFreak that they use blocking software to restrict access to these websites. This is done to protect Internet users from seeing inappropriate or illegal content.

“In an effort to protect patrons from inappropriate content or malicious activity and comply with existing laws, NYPL uses filtering software to prevent access to identified websites that offer potentially illegal or malicious content, as well as those that may cause harm to Library technology,” TorrentFreak was told.

The library admits that overblocking occurs but stresses that Internet users can request a site to be re-evaluated by sending an email to [email protected] NYPL is currently looking into the inclusion of TorrentFreak.com but we have yet to hear the verdict.

Unfortunately the issues above are not limited to NYPL. Every other week we are notified by readers who can’t access TorrentFreak since it’s blocked at their work or school because the site is classified as a source of illegal file-sharing. More often than not we’re collateral damage.

If anything, the above shows that these filtering systems can cause harm to legitimate sites. Sadly, becoming unblocked is not an easy task either. TorrentFreak previously reached out to Websense to see if we could be re-categorized as news but we never heard back.

While NYPL probably has the best intentions, we have to conclude that their mission “to advance knowledge by providing free and open access to materials and information,” is only true on paper.

Update: TorrentFreak is no longer blocked by NYPL.

“NYPL reviewed TorrentFreak and determined it was mis-identified by our filtering software and unblocked the website to correct the error,” a spokesperson told us.