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EFF To Japan: Reject Website Blocking (eff.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: The latest country to consider a website blocking proposal is Japan, and EFF has responded to the call for comment by sharing all the reasons that cutting off websites is a terrible solution for copyright violations. In response to infringement of copyrighted material, specifically citing a concern for manga, the government of Japan began work on a proposal that would make certain websites inaccessible in Japan. In response to Japan's proposal, EFF explained that website blocking is not effective at the stated goal of protecting artists and their work. First, it can be easily circumvented. Second, it ends up capturing a lot of lawful expression. Blocking an entire website does not distinguish between legal and illegal content, punishing both equally. According to numerous studies, the best answer to the problem of online infringement is providing easy, lawful alternatives. Doing this also has the benefit of not penalizing legitimate expression the way blocking does. According to The Japan Times, the "emergency measure" would "encourage [ISPs] to restrict access to such 'malicious' websites 'on a voluntary basis' in order to protect the nation's famed manga and anime industries from free-riders."
Looks like a useless study in that it doesn't measure piracy, only traffic to websites that the study monitored. Of course blocking some of those websites should reduce the traffic to them, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to other websites that aren't being monitored or aren't getting their pirated media in other ways.
Of course if your study showed that blocking websites did fuck all in terms of preventing piracy it would be a lot harder to justify doing it.
Um... This is kind of the raison d'être of the organization. What exactly did you think they did?
Note: I disagree with them fairly often, but on balance, I think the world is better off with them around to tackle the digital issues that most lay-people don't understand or may not even hear about.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
1. The same rules apply to everyone. Media companies don't get a free passdon't get a free pass just because they own a lot of copyrighted content.
2. The company(ies) requesting the block have to financially compensate the blocked website if it's later discovered that their claim of copyright violation was in error. Unlike is currently done under the DMCA where media companies regularly claim copyright violation on YouTube videos and get them defended. And when the person who posts the video is finally able to prove that there was no copyright violation, the media companies only have to say "oopsies, sorry."
If you follow these common-sense guidelines, you'll quickly find that the problem with blocking websites for repeated copyright violations is that the websites which feature large amounts of media (e.g. news sites, art/photo sharing sites, etc) are the ones which get accused of copyright violation the most. And you'll conclude that an outright ban based on a handful of accusations ends up hurting some of the most useful sites disproportionately.