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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."
And they want a pony too.
Just find the head of the MPAA and shoot him in the head. Repeat until they disband.
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"
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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Behind some of these proposals there is an assumption: That any large and popular file on the internet is probably pirated, and should be assumed to be pirated until shown otherwise.
Do these entertainment executives believe that it is impossible for popular media to be created outside of their studios? That they and they alone have the talent and resources to make something that people want to watch?
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.