Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites And Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal
from the what's-42.4-million-innocent-domains-among-friends? dept
Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing in significant ways. One issue became evident in February, when the VPN provider AirVPN announced that it would no longer accept users resident in Italy because of the “burdensome” requirements of the new system. Shortly afterwards, TorrentFreak published a story about the system crashing under the weight of requests to block just a few hundred IP addresses. Since there are now around two billion copyright claims being made every year against YouTube material, it’s unlikely that Piracy Shield will be able to cope once takedown requests start ramping up, as they surely will.
That’s a future problem, but something that has already been encountered concerns one of the world’s largest and most important content delivery networks (CDN), Cloudflare. CDNs have a key function in the Internet’s ecology. They host and deliver digital material to users around the globe, using their large-scale infrastructure to provide this quickly and efficiently on behalf of Web site owners. Blocking CDN addresses is reckless: it risks affecting thousands or even millions of sites, and compromises some of the basic plumbing of the Internet. And yet according to a post on TorrentFreak, that is precisely what Piracy Shield has now done:
Around 16:13 on Saturday [24 February], an IP address within Cloudflare’s AS13335, which currently accounts for 42,243,794 domains according to IPInfo, was targeted for blocking [by Piracy Shield]. Ownership of IP address 188.114.97.7 can be linked to Cloudflare in a few seconds, and doubled checked in a few seconds more.
The service that rightsholders wanted to block was not the IP address’s sole user. There’s a significant chance of that being the case whenever Cloudflare IPs enter the equation; blocking this IP always risked taking out the target plus all other sites using it.
The TorrentFreak article lists a few of the evidently innocent sites that were indeed blocked by Piracy Shield, and notes:
Around five hours after the blockade was put in place, reports suggest that the order compelling ISPs to block Cloudflare simply vanished from the Piracy Shield system. Details are thin, but there is strong opinion that the deletion may represent a violation of the rules, if not the law.
That lack of transparency about what appears to be a major overblocking is part of a larger problem, which affects those who are wrongfully cut off. As TorrentFreak writes, AGCOM’s “rigorous complaint procedure” for Piracy Shield “effectively doesn’t exist”:
information about blocks that should be published to facilitate correction of blunders, is not being published, also in violation of the regulations.
That matters, because appeals against Piracy Shield’s blocks can only be made within five working days of their publication. As a result, the lack of information about erroneous blocks makes it almost impossible for those affected to appeal in time:
That raises the prospect of a blocked innocent third party having to a) proactively discover that their connectivity has been limited b) isolate the problem to Italy c) discover the existence of AGCOM d) learn Italian and e) find the blocking order relating to them.
No wonder, then that:
some ISPs, having seen the mess, have decided to unblock some IP addresses without permission from those who initiated the mess, thus contravening the rules themselves.
In other words, not only is the Piracy Shield system wrongly blocking innocent sites, and making it hard for them to appeal against such blocks, but its inability to follow the law correctly is causing ISPs to ignore its rulings, rendering the system pointless.
This combination of incompetence and ineffectiveness brings to mind an earlier failed attempt to stop people sharing unauthorized copies. It’s still early days, but there are already indications that Italy’s Piracy Shield could well turn out to be a copyright fiasco on the same level as France’s Hadopi system, discussed in detail in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free).
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: agcom, copyright, due process, italy, piracy shield, takedowns
Companies: cloudflare
Comments on “Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites And Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal”
Block first, ask questions later
13 years. That is how many years ago when the biggest online protest ever against an out-of-control site blocking regime in the U.S. Sport companies want insta-blocking, no questions asked, to protect their live content. Such a system comes at a cost of any platform regardless if it is a piracy haven or not.
The sport industry really needs to change their business model. Their old business model on relying on faster copyright enforcement is poisonous to the digital world.
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When it comes to piracy, I’m going my part!
This is exactly why copyright maximalists need to be silenced (and I don’t mean killed, just prohibited from ever working in any copyright authority or position where they have power over any copyright). Nobody in their right mind would ban a CDN IP address. Just as nobody in their right mind would develop a system that is so flawed like this. Blocking a CDN address is not only insane because it blocks a ridiculously huge number of domains behind the address, but it also is ineffective because CDNs like to reroute website traffic depending on it’s location, among other characteristics. So even if you did manage to “block” a CDN address (for stupid reasons I’m sure), just so you could block a single website (!), there’s no guarantee that your next request to that blocked domain will actually be routed to that particular CDN address, and could just as easily be routed to somewhere that isn’t blocked.
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Yep. This problem is so old, older than widespread CDNs. (Remember when “colo” was the hot term?) Since absolute ages, sites have shared IP addresses. They just didn’t care. At all.
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Or when bans meant for one person affected another, because thanks dynamic IP addresses.
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Copyright minimalists should also be silenced because the louder they shout, the more strenuous the maximalists’ arguments, increasing the risk that Congress will hear them and act by drafting (and potentially passing) even more onerous bills.
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key words: right mind
Arleady seen in Russia, Ukraine and some other post-Soviet countries.
CDN IPs (cloudlfare was one of most affected) gets blocked because $some_bad_site and if it’s old-style Russian block – Cloudflare will get notice and it would be possible for anybody to check. If it’s new-style (centrally controlled DPI) Russian block or other post-soviet countries blocks – you will not get even such warnings. End result? Everbody uses VPNs. Such system was created in Russia to protect children from abuse, later updated to protect copyright owners from loss of profits, now it’s mostly used to protect people against information goverment doesn’t want them to knew.
At least they managed to get the data-trains to run on time.
… wait. Word just in. That was talking about something entirely different. Nevermind.
This was always the end goal for copyright enforcement. The one thing getting in their way was pesky people appealing their innocence after they caught dolphins in their dragnets. With legal precedence and protection, now copyright barely even needs to care about the hit to their PR.
Which is why copyright-types like John Smith deserve no sympathy or benefit of the doubt. He’ll just whine about Craigslist and Section 230 again.
No, ISPs need to comply as hard as they can....
If ISP comply as hard as they can it will create a huge economic disaster in Italy. This, in turn, will either result in Italy becoming irrelevant or Italians seeing the mess and forcing the blocking requirement to be removed.
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Hooray for malicious compliance! Just let me get my popcorn… Okay, go ahead, block the entire country.
Italians. If you sit idly by as this happens, you deserve it.
Now if only we could suck copyrighted materials out of people’s brains, like in that one episode of spongebob.
I rather suspect that ‘making it effectively impossible to protest/appeal a blocking order’ is a feature, not a bug to the law’s supporters and writers.
In other news, local real estate agents have demolished another shopping mall due to an anonymous tip that one of the stores inside sold a CD that might have been illegally copied.