Aussie Rightsholders Look To Feature Creep Site-Blocking To Search-Blocking, Because Of Course They Are

from the not-a-bug dept

When it comes to censorship in the name of copyright, we've made the point time and again that opening this door an inch will cause supporters of censorship to try to barge through and open it all the way. Inevitably, when a population tries to satiate the entertainment industry by giving them just a little censorship, that industry will ask for more and more and more.

A good example of this can be seen right now in Australia. Like far too many countries, Australia began a site-blocking practice three or so years ago. Currently, the Department of Commnications is asking for feedback on the effectiveness of this practice as well as feedback on each step in the process itself. The way it works in Australia is that rightsholders have to get an initial injunction which then winds its way to a site being blocked as a "pirate site." Well, for the largest entertainment industry groups in Australia, the feedback is essentially, "This is great, let's censor even more!"

The most aggressive submissions come from the two companies that have made the most use of the blocking scheme so far – movie group Village Roadshow and TV provider Foxtel. Together the companies have had dozens of sites blocked in Australia by local ISPs but now they want the blocking regime expanded to online service platforms too. Indeed, in the Roadshow and Foxtel submissions combined, Google is mentioned no less than 29 times as being part of the piracy problem Down Under.

“Village Roadshow strongly supported the original site blocking legislation and now we strongly support strengthening it,” Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke writes. “With all major pirate sites blocked in Australia, the front door of the department store is shut. However, pirates, facilitated by Google and other search engines, are circumventing Australian Laws and Courts and opening a huge back door. Australia needs the power to require Google and other search engines to take reasonable steps to stop facilitating searches which lead to pirate sites.”

In case it isn't obvious, these attacks on Google are plainly absurd. Google is a search company and it makes its money by returning the best results for what people are searching. Whether that is infringing content or not doesn't matter to Google. Only the usefulness of its search results matters. It's also not clear why, if the site-blocking through ISPs is as effective as Village Roadshow says, they should also need Google to delist so-called "pirate sites." Aren't those sites being blocked by ISPs? If a Google search can somehow defeat the site-blocking, then the site-blocking isn't nearly as effective as advertised.

But Village Roadshow doubles down with a hilariously wrong analogy later in its submission.

“The analogy for Google is a Westfield Shopping Centre knowing they are getting big traffic to the center from a store that is using stolen goods to lure people and then robbing them!” he writes.

I've never had pain from my eyes rolling so hard until reading that sentence. Still, the people in Australia should be paying attention, because what Village Roadshow and its cohorts want is to extend the censoring of sites it deems to be "pirate sites" to "intermediary service providers", which means search companies and social media companies Suddenly, the sharing tool that is the internet and social media will live at the pleasure of entertainment industries that have never, ever, ever been able to accurately determine what is a "pirate site" and what is just an otherwise useful site with some users that are infringing on some copyrights.

It's also worth noting that search companies had already voluntarily agreed to demote infringing sites in search results. Foxtel, the other large entertainment industry player in Australia, noted as much in its own comment submission, before going on to hand-wave it away as insufficient.

Village Roadshow, Foxtel doesn’t appear to be content with demotion – blocking and delisting is the aim.

“Foxtel strongly believes that extending the site blocking powers to search engines so that they must remove copyright infringing sites from search results would have a substantial impact on reducing piracy in Australia,” the company says.

“Search engines already remove URLs from site indexes to comply with local laws and product community standards and therefore, technologically Foxtel understands it would be a relatively simple exercise for search engines to comply with Australian blocking orders.”

Creep, creep, creep. That is how this works. If you open the door an inch, they will come barging through. And it's worth repeating again that the entertainment industry has never been able to be accurate in its accusations. So what Village Roadshow and Foxtel are really asking for is broad power to censor sites from most of the common internet platforms and search engines that most people use when they have not shown the ability to treat that kind of responsibility with care. And, indeed, they actually want the bar to be lowered as to what is a "pirate site."

While none of the above is particularly new in the global scheme of things, it’s interesting to note that even when agreements are reached and new legislation is formed, rightsholders always keep pushing for more.

That’s clearly highlighted in the Foxtel submission when the company says that the threshold for determining a pirate site should be lowered. Currently, a site must have a “primary purpose” to “infringe, or to facilitate the infringement” of copyright. Foxtel sees this as being too high.

So a site should be considered a pirate site even if the purpose of the site isn't to be a pirate site? Cool. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Filed Under: australia, copyright, piracy, search blocking, site blocking

Comcast Protected Browsing Blocks TorrentFreak, Showing Why Site-Blocking Sucks Out Loud Always

from the voluntary-overblock dept

While site-blocking is now a global phenomena, every country appears to be on a different trajectory in how it does this new flavor of censorship. Russia, for instance, looks for any excuse to block the availability of a website on its soil, resulting in absolutely hilarious amounts of collateral damage. Italy is slightly more judicious, but still does its site-blocking sans due process, whereas Ireland has just begun to open the door to site-blocking, with all kinds of major media companies just waiting to barge through it. Here in America, site-blocking is typically reserved for streaming sites during major sporting events and the voluntary blocking companies like Comcast offer with its "Protected Browsing" service.

But let's be clear: all of these points on the spectrum suck out loud. Collateral damage is the rule, not the outlier, and these efforts at justified censorship always creep, if not dash, towards the other line of reasonable behavior. As an example of this, let's go back to the site-blocking Comcast performs for customers who enable its "Protected Browsing" feature. This feature is supposed to protect internet users from malware, unwanted pornography, and pirate sites. It also apparently keeps people from being able to access news sites like TorrentFreak.

A reader alerted us that, when he tried to access TorrentFreak, access was denied stating that a “suspicious” site was ahead. A pirate logo on the blocking page suggests that there’s copyright-infringing activity involved. While it’s no secret that we cover a lot of news related to piracy, it goes a bit far to label this type of news reporting as suspicious.

There are a million possible explanations for how something like this happens. Perhaps the filter is way too aggressive, saw the word "torrent" in the name of the site, and simply blocked it. Perhaps something is being picked up either in the subject matter of the posts at TF, or in the comments, resulting in a block. Perhaps links to other sites contained in the posts are a factor. Or, least likely of all, perhaps someone at Comcast has it in for the folks at TorrentFreak and blocked the site maliciously.

Here's the thing: none of that matters. The only thing that matters is that TorrentFreak is not a malicious site, is not a pirate site, is not a suspicious site, and yet it has been blocked by this feature anyway. The ultimate answer to the question "why?" is that site-blocking like this always sucks, always goes wrong, and always carries out collateral damage. Whether its done through abuse or ineptitude doesn't really matter when the result is the same: innocent sites being blocked.

And if you happen to think TorrentFreak does something nefarious enough to make any of this warranted -- about which you're wrong, by the way -- even more innocuous sites have been caught up in this as well.

Previously, Comcast users reported that this system prevented people from accessing PayPal as well, which is a bit much, and others reported that it stopped the Steam store from loading properly.

So, for proponents of site-blocking as a solution to piracy and all the internet's ills, why in the world would I trust government to do this better than Comcast does it on a voluntary basis?

Filed Under: blocking, content moderation, filters, site blocking
Companies: comcast, torrentfreak

Study Suggests Shutting Down Filesharing Sites Would Hurt Music Industry, New Artists

from the you-don't-say dept

The evolution of the music industry's response to the fact that copyright infringement exists on the internet has been both plodding and frustrating. The industry, which has gone through stages including a focus on high-profile and punitive lawsuits against individual "pirates", its own flavors of copyright trolling, and misguided attempts to "educate" the masses as to why their natural inclinations are the worst behavior ever, have since settled into a mantra that site-blocking censorship of the internet is the only real way to keep the music industry profitable. All of this stems from a myopic view on piracy held by the industry that it is always bad for every artist any time a music file is downloaded for free as opposed to purchased off of iTunes or wherever. We have argued for years that this view is plainly wrong and far too simplistic, and that there is actually plenty of evidence that, for a large portion of the music industry, piracy may actually be a good thing.

Well, there has been an update to a study first publicized as a work in progress several years ago run by the Information Economics and Policy Journal out of Queen's University. Based on that study, it looks like attempts to shut down filesharing sites would not just be ineffectual, but disastrous for both the music industry as a whole and especially new and smaller-ticket artists. The most popular artists, on the other hand, tend to be more hurt by piracy than helped. That isn't to be ignored, but we must keep in mind that the purpose of copyright law is to get more art created for the benefit of the public and it seems obvious that the public most benefits from a larger successful music ecosystem as opposed to simply getting more albums from the largest audiences.

The methodology in the study isn't small peanuts, either. It considered 250,000 albums across five million downloads and looked to match up the pirating of those works and what effect that piracy had in the market for that music.

“I now find that top artists are harmed and mid-tier artists may be helped in both markets, but that these effects are larger for digital sales,” Lee tells TorrentFreak. “This is consistent with the idea that people are more willing to switch between digital piracy and digital sales than between digital piracy and physical CDs.”

The findings lead to the conclusion that there is no ideal ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to piracy. In fact, some unauthorized sharing may be a good thing.

This is in line with observations from musicians themselves over the past years. Several top artists have admitted the positive effects of piracy, including Ed Sheeran, who recently said that he owes his career to it.

None of this is to argue that piracy is always a net benefit, obviously. Such an argument would be the counterargument to the music industry's description of piracy as always bad, all the time, for everyone. And it would be equally fallacious. What this study chiefly points out is exactly what the conclusion above states: there is no one-size fits all truth on the effect of piracy for artists. It helps some, it hurts others.

While we shouldn't take the negative impact on artists it may hurt lightly, remember that this is all framed by a music industry regularly calling for the blocking of filesharing sites. That really is a one size fits all "solution" to piracy and, based on this study, it would hurt many, many musical acts.

According to the researcher, the music industry should realize that shutting down pirate sites may not always be the best option. On the contrary, file-sharing sites may be useful as promotional platforms in some cases.

“Following above, a policy of total shutdown of private file sharing networks seems excessively costly (compared with their relatively small impact on sales) and unwise (as a one-size-fits-all policy). It would be better to make legal consumption more convenient, reducing the demand for piracy as an alternative to purchasing,” Lee tells us. “It would also be smart to experiment with releasing music onto piracy networks themselves, especially for up-and-coming artists, similar to the free promotion afforded by commercial radio.”

The pain here is in how obvious it all is. We've been saying exactly this for years, except the proposed solutions from the music industry have only grown more drastic in that same time. Flat censorship is something of a nuclear option and it's being used against sites that actually help some percentage of artists.

How in the world is that the best plan for a thriving music ecosystem?

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, infringement, musicians, piracy, research, site blocking, studies

Canadian ISPs And Hollywood Agree On Plan To Make Themselves Judge, Jury and Website Executioner

from the who-needs-government? dept

If you take a quick look through the long history of posts we've done on the subject of site-blocking as a method for combating piracy, you'll notice that we've been fairly critical of the courts in various countries, which are issuing the blocking orders commonly. Here in America, the story is essentially the same, with only minor differences in the laws or lack of laws between each country causing barely different legal justifications for the censorship of sites that one entertainment group or another says is infringing. Too often, the courts appear to take plaintiff claims of infringement as gospel, where in some countries there is even a governmental framework that seems perfectly designed to abuse this process and have compliant courts exert as much collateral damage as possible. Our point all along is that there needs to be a refining of this process to keep the censorship out of the results and ensure that no speech that ought to be protected is caught up in the mix.

It should go without saying that the new plan being concocted by Canadian ISPs and various entertainment groups is not what we had in mind.

A coalition of movie industry companies and ISPs, including Bell, Rogers, and Cineplex are discussing a proposal to implement such measures. The Canadian blocklist would be maintained by a new non-profit organization called “Internet Piracy Review Agency” (IPRA) and enforced through the CTRC, Canadaland reports.

The new proposal is being discussed by various stakeholders including ISPs and local movie companies. As in other countries, major American movie companies are also in the loop, but they will not be listed as official applicants when the plan is submitted to the CRTC.

If something appears to be missing in all of that, it's probably because the plan doesn't make any room for anything resembling judicial oversight or the court system. Rather, this would all be implemented without any court orders or even filings from any actual copyright holder. Instead, rightsholders would inform ISPs that a site is "blatantly, overwhelmingly or structurally" built purely to engage in copyright infringement, and the ISPs would take it down. I'm sure the idea is to keep this to the most egregious of sites that are often quite bare of legitimate and protected speech, except we already know just how shitty ISPs are at being copyright cops, so it seems clear that they'll be relying almost exclusively on the word of rightsholders to implement these site-blocks.

Critics, including Michael Geist, are not pleased.

“Recent history suggests that the list will quickly grow to cover tougher judgment calls. For example, Bell has targeted TVAddons, a site that contains considerable non-infringing content,” Geist notes.

“It can be expected that many other sites disliked by rights holders or broadcasters would find their way onto the block list,” he adds.

Fortunately, all of this would have to go before the Canadian government before going into operations, and the CRTC doesn't seem to be all that enthused.

Thus far, the Government appears to be reluctant in its response. In comments to Canadaland spokesperson Karl Sasseville stressed that Canada maintains committed to an open Internet.

“Our government supports an open internet where Canadians have the ability to access the content of their choice in accordance to Canadian laws,” Sasseville says. “While other parts of the world are focused on building walls, we’re focused on opening doors‎.”

The timing of this is also quite poor, given the unfortunate conversation about net neutrality that is occurring with Canada's sub-friendly neighbors to its south. See, site-blocking has never been fully conflated with net neutrality thus far, in large part because the courts have been an admittedly imperfect check on telecom industry power abuse. But in this plan there is no court to provide that check, only a loose government agency oversight twice separated from the ISPs actions by a newly crafted non-profit.

Meanwhile, of course, the very attempt to skirt any representatives of the democratic government and its court system is about as against the public interest as it gets, as Geist points out.

“The government rightly seems dismissive of the proposal in the Canadaland report but as leading Internet providers, Bell and Rogers should be ashamed for leading the charge on such a dangerous, anti-speech and anti-consumer proposal,” Geist concludes.

Here, here.

Filed Under: canada, copyright, due process, site blocking

Rozcomnadzor's Corruption Scandal Doesn't Prevent The Russian Government From Empowering It To Ignore Due Process

from the russia-gonna-russia dept

Reading our coverage of Rozcomnadzor, the Russian government agency tasked with keeping the internet clean of piracy, you would know that the agency has a laughably bad track record for pretty much everything. Even as ranking members of the agency have been embroiled in a corruption scandal in which they bilked Russian taxpayers by creating fake employees, the statistics out on Rozcomnadzor's ability to carry out its stated mission -- blocking sites used for piracy on the internet -- are horrendous. Put simply, the agency has managed to take down 4,000 "pirate" sites through legal cluster bombs that have inflicted 41,000 sites worth of collateral damage. Any honest look at those kinds of numbers would lead a sincere government to seriously consider whether such an agency was worthy of existence at all.

The Russian government, on the other hand, has decided to expand Rozcomnadzor's powers by essentially nixing anything that would even remotely look like due process. The new proposal being considered by the Russian Ministry of Culture is severe, to say the least.

A new amendment that that was published by the Ministry of Culture proposes to allow for near-instant pirate site blockades to protect the local movie industry, Vedomosti reports.

At the moment, website owners are given three days to remove infringing content before any action is taken. Under the new proposal, site blockades would be implemented less than 24 hours after Rozcomnadzor is alerted. Website owners will not get the chance to remove the infringing content and a court order isn't required either.

If this looks like a change almost perfectly designed for even more collateral damage and practically begging to be abused, then you're looking at this in exactly the right way. The collateral damage, already severe, will be worsened by the supercharged speed of the takedown process and the omission of any site's ability to address the court's concerns prior to having its site censored. It's almost as if removing infringing material from websites isn't the actual goal of this agency at all. Instead, quick censorship based on accusations without judicial oversight is the order of the day, and it is inevitable that the government and adverse commercial entities will wield this weapon with abandon.

Keep in mind that Rozcomnadzor has already proven itself unreliable on matters of public servitude. The Russian government itself, of course, has little interest in free speech rights for its citizens and has built a reputation for itself as perfectly willing to pretzel Russian law to silence dissenting opinions. Everyone should be immediately suspicious of the Russian government handing itself so much power to censor outside of the Russian's courts purview.

There are some making much noise about the law's requirement that sites be infringing on Russian films.

The new blocking plans go further than any of the previous legislation, but they will only apply to movies that have “a national film certificate” from Russian authorities, as HWR points out. This doesn’t cover any Hollywood movies, which typically top the local box office.

Except this focus on Russian films hasn't kept those tens of thousands of sites caught up as collateral damage out of the censorship blast, has it? This new law under consideration is dangerous to anyone that cares about free speech, particularly in a region already besieged by efforts to limit that speech.

Filed Under: corruption, due process, rozcomnadzor, russia, site blocking
Companies: rozcomnadzor

Judge Ignores Congress, Pretends SOPA Exists, Orders Site Blocking Of Sci-Hub

from the how's-that-work-now? dept

Last month, we wrote about the strange and unfortunate decision by a magistrate judge in the copycat lawsuit by the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub, the "renegade" online repository of academic knowledge. As we've discussed for years, the copyright attacks on Sci-Hub are silly, given the entire stated purpose of copyright is supposed to be to increase "learning" (and there's rarely a monetary incentive to the scholars writing academic articles). Copyright in academic papers is silly for a whole host of reasons, and then using copyright law to take down what is effectively an incredibly useful library of academic knowledge seems to run entirely counter to the basis of copyright law.

And yet, things with Sci-Hub keep getting dumber. After it lost the lawsuit Elsevier filed against it, the American Chemical Society jumped in to file a copy cat lawsuit. The issue last month was our surprise that a magistrate judge recommended an injunction against third parties who were not parties to the lawsuit, demanding that they block all access to Sci-Hub. This could impact tons of ISPs, search engines, domain registrars and more. On Friday, amazingly, the Title III judge on the case, Judge Leonie Brinkema, more or less went with the magistrate's recommendations, with one slight change. You can see the order and injunction either at those links, or embedded below.

Because Sci-Hub -- run by a woman who doesn't live in the US -- chose to ignore the lawsuit, this is a default judgment, so the judge never got to hear anyone else's viewpoint, other than ACS. It's troubling that the judge -- just prior to issuing the injunction -- decided to reject an attempted amicus brief from CCIA, which sought to explain why site blocking is not allowed as a remedy. The judge did make one change, which at the very least improves the injunction slightly. The official injunction reads as follows:

ORDERED that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of the ACS Marks or ACS's Copyrighted Works; and it is FURTHER

ORDERED that the domain name registries and/or registrars for Defendant Sci-Hub's domain names and websites, or their technical administrators, shall place the domain names on registryHold/serverHold or other status to render the names/sites non-resolving.

The original recommendation from the magistrate judge said that "any person or entity in privity with Sci-Hub" had to do those things. The difference being switching out "in active concert or participation" rather than "in privity." That's... slightly better, but it's unclear exactly what "in active concert or participation" really means.

ACS is now claiming that this won't apply to general search engines, but just to those working more closely with Sci-Hub:

“The court’s affirmative ruling does not apply to search engines writ large, but only to those entities who have been in active concert or participation with Sci-Hub, such as websites that host ACS content stolen by Sci-Hub. ACS will now look to identify said entities and seek enforcement accordingly.”

Steve McLaughlin, who has been following the case closely, expects that ACS is likely to target Cloudflare with this injunction -- and it will be worth seeing how Cloudflare responds.

Either way, setting aside the questions about why we're even arguing about a library of academic research that was not incentivized by copyright, it's still perplexing that a federal judge believes this is a justifiable remedy. Again, five years ago Congerss explored the idea of allowing site blocking as a remedy for copyright infringement and decided against it when it chose not to pass SOPA/PIPA (whose main purpose was to create a site blocking remedy). No matter what you think of Sci-Hub, it should worry people when judges can demand third parties censor and block sites, without any First Amendment analysis whatsoever.

Filed Under: academic research, copyright, site blocking, sopa
Companies: acs, american chemical society, cloudflare, sci-hub

Collateral Damage Not Russian Site-Blocking's Only Failure: Pirate Video Market Has Doubled As Well

from the fail-and-fail-and-fail dept

Over the summer, we discussed how laughably bad Russia's efforts at blocking so-called "piracy sites" has been. In the course of four years of attempting to stamp out copyright infringement in the country, the Russian government managed to block 4,000 sites it intended to target as piracy sites, and 41,000 sites it had not intended to target that were caught up as collateral damage. Those are the kind of numbers that would make a cluster bomb blush.

Even so, you might have imagined that this heavy-handed iron-fist routine must surely have had some reduction effect on the rate of piracy in Russia. The short answer to that is: nooooooope. Instead, over the course of the past few years, the market for pirated video content in Russia has doubled.

According to new research published by Group-IB and reported by Izvestia, Internet pirates have been adapting to their new reality, finding new and stable ways of doing business while growing their turnover.

In fact, according to the ‘Economics of Pirate Sites Report 2016’, they’ve been so successful that the market for Internet pirate video more than doubled in value during 2016, reaching a peak of 3.3 billion rubles ($57.2m) versus just 1.5 billion rubles ($26m) in 2015. Overall Internet piracy in 2016 was valued at a billion rubles more ($74.5m), Group-IB notes.

So what's going on here? Well, the Russian government is learning the invaluable lesson that the internet is built to route around this kind of censorship. That old adage aside, what's actually occurring is the start of an arms-race between website operators in Russia and the government agencies dedicated to stopping them. And the government is losing. Badly.

Overall, it’s estimated that the average pirate video site makes around $156,000 per year via advertising, subscriptions, or via voluntary donations. They’re creative with their money channels too.

According to Maxim Ryabyko, Director General of Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO), sites use middle-men for dealing with both advertisers and payment processors, which enables operators to remain anonymous.

This sort of shell game being employed by possibly truly pirate-y websites is the same one played by all kinds of websites looking to survive attempts at censorship. Where we might decry a site doing this to offer up video content that infringes copyright, we would applaud its use if the site were advocating for free speech, fair and open elections, etc. In other words, it's the censorship that is bad, not necessarily the actions of those routing around it.

And, more to the point, it doesn't work. In the face of these damning numbers, the Russian government has two options: give up or censor even harder. The latter will, naturally, result in even more of the collateral damage that has already been inflicted. Still, it seems the more likely scenario.

Filed Under: piracy, russia, site blocking

Shouldn't Federal Judges Understand That Congress Did Not Pass SOPA?

from the hello-prior-restraint dept

We've discussed in the past the completely ridiculous attacks on Sci-Hub, a site that should be celebrated as an incredible repository of all the world's academic knowledge. It's an incredible and astounding achievement... and, instead of celebrating it, we have big publishers attacking it. Because copyright. And even though the purpose of copyright was supposedly to advance "learning" and Sci-Hub serves that purpose amazingly well, so many people have bought into the myth of copyrights must "exclude" usage, that we're in a time where one of the most amazing libraries in the world is being attacked. Sci-Hub lost its big case earlier this year, and almost immediately others piled on. Specifically, back in June, the American Chemical Society (ACS) jumped in with a similar "us too!" lawsuit, knowing full well that Sci-Hub would likely ignore it.

ACS has moved for a default judgment against Sci-Hub (what you tend to get when the defendant ignores the lawsuit), which it would likely get. However, in an extremely troubling move, the magistrate judge reviewing the case for the Article III judge who will make the final ruling has recommended forcing ISPs and search engines to block access to Sci-Hub. After recommending the standard (and expected) injunction against Sci-Hub, the recommendation then says:

In addition, the undersigned recommends that it be ordered that any person or entity in privity with Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of ACS's trademarks or copyrighted works. Finally, the undersigned recommends that it be ordered that the domain name registries and/or registrars for Sci-Hub's domain names and websites, or their technical administrators, shall place the domain names on registryHold/serverHold or such other status to render the names/sites non-resolving.

So, this is kind of incredible. Because, as you might remember, there was a big fight a little over five years ago about a pair of bills in Congress called SOPA and PIPA that proposed allowing for such an order being issued to third parties like search engines, ISPs, domain registrars and the like, demanding they block all access to certain websites. And, following quite a public outcry (which also explained why this approach would do serious harm to certain security standards and other technical aspects of how the internet works), Congress backed down and decided it did not want to enable courts to issue such orders.

So why the hell is Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson recommending such an order?

At the very least, it seems problematic. Even if you ignore the Sci-Hub part of the equation (since it ignored the lawsuit, a default judgment was basically inevitable), you should be concerned about this. Here's a court order binding a very large number of non-parties to the lawsuit to completely block access to a variety of websites, without any sort of due process. One hopes that ISPs, domain registrars and search engines will push back on such an overbroad order -- one that even Congress realized was a step too far and never authorized.

Filed Under: copyright, dns, injunctions, intermediary liability, john f. anderson, search engines, site blocking, sopa
Companies: acs, sci-hub

MPA Gets Ireland To Crack Open The Site-Blocking Door It Plans To Bust Through

from the block-party dept

Give an inch and they will take a mile, as the saying goes. This mantra applies quite nicely to the recent spate of site-blocking efforts that have taken place around the world. Once content owners, chiefly Hollywood and music groups based in America, manage to slightly open the door to having entire sites blocked by order of government, they then barge through and expand the scope of the site-blocking exponentially.

And the groups doing this barging don't even bother to hide their plans. In Ireland, one can see this in the recent news of the Motion Picture Association submitting an order to have several websites blocked by ISPs there.

On behalf of several major Hollywood studios, the group requested Irish Internet providers to block access to three popular streaming sites; movie4k.to, primewire.ag, and onwatchseries.to. In their complaint, the movie studios, including Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros, described the sites as massive copyright infringement hubs, with each offering thousands of infringing movies.

Monday evening the court approved the request. This means that the three websites will soon be rendered unavailable by Eircom, Sky Ireland, Vodafone Ireland, Virgin Media Ireland, Three Ireland, Digiweb, Imagine Telecommunications, and Magnet Networks.

The blocking of entire websites on the basis of industry complaints should be seen as no small thing. Given how often sites that Hollywood claims are "pirate sites" in fact have completely legitimate uses, wary eyes should be cast at this sort of censorship. These three sites may not fall under that falsely accused designation. The problem is that in the immediate aftermath of the court's decision, the MPA is licking its chops to go after many, many more sites.

The ISP asked the court to put a cap on the number of notifications, limiting it to 50 per month. However, the movie studios objected to a blocking cap, and the judge decided not to add any limitations for now.

No caps, because as we've seen in other European countries, these blocking requests will now be vastly expanded to include all kinds of websites. With that volume increase will come mistakes, overreach, and false accusations. It's what always happens. And at that point, Irish citizens, and perhaps the courts, will realize exactly what kind of Pandora's box has been opened to satiate the folks in Hollywood. The ISPs in Ireland already know this, as they are hedging their support for these blocking efforts in the future.

Irish Times reports that none of the ISPs opposed the blocking request. However, Eir said that the costs involved could become an issue if the number of blocked websites increases drastically in the future.

It's easy money to bet that those drastic increases will come about quite quickly. Hollywood can't seem to keep from barging through a door like this once it's been cracked open.

Filed Under: copyright, ireland, movies, site blocking
Companies: mpa

Italian Court Says Due Process Isn't Necessary For Blocking Sites Over Copyright Infringement

from the zoom-zoom! dept

A years-long fight in Italy between copyright rightsholders (chiefly Hollywood) and consumer groups looking to protect Italian citizens, took a dark turn recently. If you aren't already aware, the Italian government put in place a delightful regulation in 2014 giving the Authority for Comunications Guarantees (AGCOM) the authority to simply block websites deemed infringing outright, without the need for such pesky things as court cases or trials. Consumer groups immediately challenged the regulation, stating that it violated the Italian constitution, specifically suggesting that giving a government body the authority to unilaterally block websites without any sort of judicial review was a violation of the exercise of freedom of expression and economic initiative. Given exactly how often demonized websites are demonstrated to have perfectly legitimate uses, not to mention how absolutely terrible every government everywhere seems to be in understanding and protecting things like Fair Use, it's an easy argument to understand.

Unfortunately, an administrative court in Italy has chosen to take itself out of the judicial review business when it comes to site-blocking.

The case was initially rejected by the Constitutional Court in 2015, which referred it back to the administrative court of Lazio. Last week this court decided that the site blocking procedure is in line with both European and Italian law. According to the court, the site-blocking regulation is compatible with the European Union’s E-Commerce Directive as well as the Italian Copyright Act. In addition, the procedure doesn’t violate the Italian constitution or fundamental rights in general, as opponents had argued.

Overall the case is seen as a significant victory for copyright holders. Not only can they continue with their site-blocking requests, but the court also clarified that all the blocking costs must be paid by Internet providers.

In other words, it's now open season on sites that rightsholders decide they don't like. No need for a trial in which to prove any actual allegations. No need to prepare a rebuttal from a defendant arguing for their own rights. Instead, rightsholders, such as Hollywood, can petition to have a site blocked and, if AGCOM agrees, the site is blocked without any due process. And, because ISPs are apparently there only to serve failing business models, all the costs associated with these review-less blocks are shouldered by the ISPs.

If you think that the copyright trolls and Hollywood aren't licking their chops to go site-blocking crazy after this decision, you've lost your mind.

“This is a big win for rightsholders,” says Enzo Mazza, chief of the Italian music group FIMI, who says that they have plans to expand the current scope of the blocking efforts.

“Our future goal is now to increase the enforcement of AGCOM to also cover new forms of piracy such as live streaming, stream ripping and similar issues. In addition, we hope AGCOM will extend the blockades to the IP-address level as the Criminal Courts are using now,” Mazza tells TorrentFreak.

And away we go. Licensing groups and rightsholders will now look to slam open the door the court left ajar for them. As the blocks are expanded, you can pretty much count on collateral damage that will harm Italian citizens and restrict their freedom both of speech and access to legitimate internet sites. But no worry, because it's not like there is a court that will oversee all of this. Instead, websites and the surfing public will live only at the pleasure of AGCOM.

That should go well.

Filed Under: agcom, copyright, due process, italy, site blocking