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Hollywood Wants Hosting Providers To Block Referral Traffic From Pirate Sites (torrentfreak.com)
The US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator is working hard to update his copyright enforcement plans. In a written submission, Hollywood's MPAA shared a few notable ideas. The group calls for more cooperation from Internet services, including hosting providers, who should filter infringing content and block referral traffic from pirate sites, among other things. From a report: Besides processing takedown notices and terminating repeat infringers, as they are required to do by law, the MPAA also wants hosting companies to use automated piracy filters on their servers. "Hosting providers should filter using automated content recognition technology; forward DMCA notices to users, terminate repeat infringers after receipt of a reasonable number of notices, and prevent re-registration by terminated users," the MPAA suggests.
In addition, hosting providers should not challenge suspension court orders, when copyright holders go up against pirate sites. Going a step further, hosts should keep an eye on high traffic volumes which may be infringing, and ban referral traffic from pirate sites outright. The MPAA wants these companies to "implement download bandwidth or frequency limitations to prevent high volume traffic for particular files" to "remove files expeditiously" and "block referral traffic from known piracy sites."
In addition, hosting providers should not challenge suspension court orders, when copyright holders go up against pirate sites. Going a step further, hosts should keep an eye on high traffic volumes which may be infringing, and ban referral traffic from pirate sites outright. The MPAA wants these companies to "implement download bandwidth or frequency limitations to prevent high volume traffic for particular files" to "remove files expeditiously" and "block referral traffic from known piracy sites."
Try the "Earned" column, see what you can still find there, or die
We'll see an upsurge in browser extensions which strip referrer from affected sites and life will go on.
Also pirate sites will just link to referrer-stripping services instead of direct linking. It'll just turn into a different type of whack-a-mole game.
What could also be a pirate site?
Germany to remove all talk of German history?
Spain? All that independence and Catalonia content?
France? No more funny art about funny French politicians.
A cult? Don't share copyright content related to their faith.
A faith? No blasphemy and quoting out of context.
A big US company that designs computer parts? No more importing counterfeit spare "parts" online.
A wealthy person who appeared in a newspaper a decade ago. No more investigative journalism to be hosted.
A movie studio that wants the bad reviews of its failed political script to not be found.
Anything that breaks DRM. A failed OS patch. A lock company and its new product.
Once hosting providers have to remove content for one special group, everyone will have a legal reason to remove more content.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So since this is a US based source going to apply US law... MPAA etc basicly claim that on their absolute say so suspected infringers are not allowed their constitutional rights to due process? There was a recent court case where a Judge denied the copyright holder (and I use that term loosely) their attempt to identify a user by asking the ISP who a subscriber was by IP due to the way they were trying to use the court. In short the copyright holder assumed guilt of an individual and was in essence making a accusation in a civil court to de-anonymise the subscriber without any due process available to the subscriber to defend such an action, given the harm that any such public accusation could have if later found to be not true.
Personally, I think the whole point is moot. We've reached the point where the powers-that-be have pretty much succeeded in disrupting The Pirate Bay off of the web. And it doesn't matter to the minority: they use Tor browser to visit the site, and once they have the magnet link, VPN to download the torrents.
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What this boils down to is that the content industry is asking ISPs to do lots of deep analysis of their traffic. That's the problem here. ISPs should have no business looking at the data portion of packets. The proposals here are all about looking at the data portion.
Yet another argument that everything needs to be encrypted and routed to a single port. You can almost do this with sslh to de-multiplex a port, but some protocols (e.g., IMAP) don't send distinguishing headers immediately when the client connects. Of course, this doesn't stop ISPs from doing packet size and frequency analysis to determine the type of traffic through fingerprinting.
In the physical world, people who want their property protected pay property taxes.
perhaps it makes sense for people who claimed ownership of intellectual property to pay IP taxes. If you don't pay your IP taxes, the item in question reverts to the public domain. The pool of IP taxes collected would be used to defray the costs ISPs incur while protecting other people's property.