ISPs Launch Legal Attack On Italy’s ‘Pirate Shield,’ Blocking Law
from the doesn't-due-process-matter dept
The copyright industry’s war on the Internet and its users has gone through various stages (full details and links to numerous references in Walled Culture the book, free digital versions available).
The first was to sue Internet users directly for sharing files. By 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had sued at least 30,000 individuals. Perhaps the most famous victim of this approach was Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two. She was found liable for $222,000 in damages for sharing twenty-four songs online. Even the judge was appalled by the extreme nature of the punishment: he called the damages “unprecedented and oppressive.” He “implored” US Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address the issue of disproportionate liability. He also ordered a new trial for Thomas. Unfortunately, on re-trial, she was found liable for even more – $1.92 million. The RIAA may have been successful in these court cases, but it eventually realized that suing grandmothers and 12-year-old girls, as it had done, made it look like a cruel and heartless bully – which it was.
So it shifted strategy, and started lobbying for a “graduated” approach, also known as “three strikes and you’re out”. The idea was that instead of taking users suspected of sharing copyright material to court, which had terrible optics, they would be sent progressively more threatening warnings by an appropriate government body, thus shielding the copyright industry from public anger. After three warnings, the person would (ideally) be thrown off the Internet, or at least fined.
France was the most enthusiastic proponent of the three-strikes approach, with its Hadopi law. Even though the government body sent out millions of warnings to French users, only one disconnection order was issued, and that was never carried out. In total, some €87,000 in fines were imposed, but the cost of running Hadopi was €82 million, paid by French taxpayers. In other words, a system that failed to scare people off from downloading unauthorized copies of copyright material cost nearly a thousand times more to run than it generated in fines.
Since attacking Internet users had proved to be such a failure, the copyright industry changed tack. Instead it sought to block access to unauthorized material using court orders against Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The idea was that if people couldn’t access the site offering the material, they couldn’t download it.
Italy has been at the forefront of this approach. In 2014, the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM) allowed sites to be blocked without the need for a court order. More recently, it has set up an automated blocking system called Piracy Shield. Rather surprisingly, according to a post on TorrentFreak, AGCOM will not check blocking requests before it validates them – it will simply assume they are justified and set the system in motion:
Once validated, AGCOM will instruct all kinds of online service providers to implement blocking. Consumer ISPs, DNS providers, cloud providers and hosting companies must take blocking action within 30 minutes, while companies such as Google must block or remove content from their search indexes.
It’s a very unfair, one-sided copyright law, which assumes that people are guilty until proven innocent. That tilting of the playing field may prove Pirate Shield’s undoing. As another post on the TorrentFreak site explains:
An ISP organization has launched a legal challenge against new Italian legislation that authorizes large-scale, preemptive piracy blocking. Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer representing the Association of Independent Providers, informs TorrentFreak that the measures appear to violate EU provisions on the protection of service providers and the right to mount a defense.
It would be nicely ironic if the very extremism of the copyright industry, which always wants legal and technical systems biased in its favor, and with as few rights as possible for anyone else, might see the latest incarnation of its assault on the digital world thrown out.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: blocking, copyright, due process, italy, piracy, pirate shield
Comments on “ISPs Launch Legal Attack On Italy’s ‘Pirate Shield,’ Blocking Law”
Has there been a single copyright law that wasn’t one-sided and premised on the idea of “guilty until proven innocent”?
I’m reminded of Awkward Zombie’s comic on Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice.
“You’ve indeed proven that the defendant could not have possibly committed the crime. But can you tell us who did?”
“What? No! Isn’t that why we have police?”
“Hmm… well, someone should go to jail, shouldn’t they?”
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Given how hated by the industry many of the core elements of early copyright law are, i might argue early copyright acts might tags been less one sided. I however won’t.
Instead i’d say any copyright act prior to the digital age was not premised on innocent until proven guilty. they were still lopsided, but enforcement was through courts, and at least on paper required someone to prove you actually infringed.
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Also, prior to the age of audio and video recorders, infringement was by someone trying to make money, as the means of infringement was a printing press, plus logistics to distribute the copies produced.
A tool that provides rapid content takedown with absolutely no validation or human oversight? That doesn’t seem to be open for abuse or errors at all. /s
Given that would require them to do something themselves though...
The ultimate punchline of course is that if they actually wanted to squash copyright infringement all they have to do is offer their stuff at affordable rates via reasonable means to everyone that wants to buy it.
Do that and I’ve little doubt that the overwhelming majority of infringement would disappear almost overnight, with only a tiny minority left who either lack the disposable funds at the moment and therefore were never possible customers, those that are looking to try before they buy(another problem that could be reduced by generous trials and the like) and those that will not pay no matter what for whatever reasons.
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If content creators wanted to quash copyright infringement there are steps that they can do, but as the story of Malibu Media has proven it’s far more lucrative to cry “piracy!” and make money off the government’s back, suing those too poor to put up any resistance.
And they probably would have continued getting away with it, had Colette and Brigham not fucked themselves over by their own greed and negligence, derailing the gravy train for other shysters trying to masquerade as victims.
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Note, for what its worth, those running the trolling operations at Malibu Media were not so much creators as people who based their living on the control of the creative works of others. When that did not turn out to be as lucrative as they hoped they turned their hand blackmail as a means of becoming filthy rich.
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You can fill up the name field with your lengthy, ranty subject title for all the good it does. But in the same way that “good” cops enable bad cops by saying nothing, content creators enable the maximalist camp by saying nothing.
How’s that Bayside Advisory defense fund coming along, bro?
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Between the questionably underaged actress having sex and the director who fancies herself a mistress ordering said actress to have sex, I struggle to decide which between the two roles exercises even less creativity.
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Man, I remember when SophisticatedJaneDoe used to post updates on Fight Copyright Trolls. It really was funny as fuck to watch Colette Pelissier squirm, bob and weave every time she tried to beg for harsher copyright penalties, while being forced to explain away why she should be let off the hook for not getting licenses to film porn on her property, omitting the ages of her models, forgetting to watermark her product… Not to mention, the horror of only being able to afford the $16 million mansion, and the one starlet, Franziska, constantly shilling for her mistress in the comments.
Malibu Media was sitting on a golden goose and it really took some Steele-level chutzpah to fuck it all up, but Colette managed it. Copyright law is truly brain damage.
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Left off my favorite part…
Creating the problem to profit from it.
I mean how else can one explain videos being online before being on the website to be “stolen”??
How else can one explain how the content keeps getting placed in larger and larger torrents that magically make the scary number they threaten that much bigger as they were facing more & more pushback.
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Do you realize that there are more people making their living while shrugging their shoulders at piracy than there are who have joined the “minimalist” bogeyman camp you love to rant about so much.
Ah… Hadopi. From the government of a copyright infringer who did it for profit. Their biggest case & award… against someone who didn’t do it, proved they didn’t do it, but because of a name on a bill… boom.
It is amazing how the law is willing to twist itself into knots to appease an industry that exists to enrich themselves and indenture artists with creative accounting.
Wrong author
The byline names the author as Mike Masnick rather than Glyn Moody.
A really bad idea (considering the necessity of internet in school, work, communication, and daily life), and it reminds me of the former Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
I don’t know how many total strikes Orrin Hatch would’ve proposed, but I do know that he got himself a strike before he died. Hey, at least he’d beat me in bowling!