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."

Comments

Oh yeah?

[mishehu]

And they want a pony too.

Meh

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Re:Meh

[mysidia]

The pirate sites just need to add one bit of HTML code....

<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" />

Modern browsers will then be redirected to send no HTTP Referrer header.

Alternatively, HTTPS could be used, and with HTTPS Referrer is suppressed, because sending it could result in a security violation for the referring domain (a HTTPS URL may contain secret content/values).

Who else gets a global filter?

[AHuxley]

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.

Whole point is moot

[cerberusss]

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.

Re:Whole point is moot

[SuricouRaven]

It was.

There was once a grant scheme called the Content Protection System Architecture, designed by a consortium of consumer electronics and media industries around the mid-2000s. It aimed to do much as you say: An interlocking network of DRM-equipped connections and media. In order for a device to use any of these technologies, the manufacturer would have to agree to a license agreement which included a condition that their device may only output high-definition video and high-quality audio using one of the other DRM-enabled, encrypted technologies that formed the CPSA family (A concession was made for analog video in non-HD for backwards compatibility, providing it used macrovision protection). In this way, it would be impossible for any media that was released in DRMed form to ever leave the DRM system: Every appliance would be encrypted-in-encrypted-out. For added protection it was to use a watermark scheme which could mark media as being from the CPSA system - any compliant device which found watermarked media input in either analog HD or unencrypted digital form would thus know that there was no legitimate way that input could have originated, and shut down. Thus the analog hole would be firmly closed.

It was a bold vision, but with a critical flaw: With all those interlinked forms of DRM, it only needed the breaking of a single element to bring the whole system down. Long before the watermark technology was ready for release, that is exactly what happened - time after time, until their grand vision of interlocked DRM technologies was reduced to a museum of the cracked and obsolete. The CPSA framework just fell apart, and I do not know what the status if the consortium is today.

It does have a legacy though. Some of the DRM technologies still in use today, including CSS and HDCP, were originally developed as part of the CPSA framework. It was also responsible for the 'Secure' in 'Secure Digital' cards - the term refers to the inclusion of the CPRM DRM technology which all Secure Digital cards are required to implement as part of the specification, though I have never heard of any device actually making use of that functionality. An obscure feature, but a mandatory part of the specification - and a revenue source for 4C Entity, the company which holds essential patents and secret keys needed to implement CPRM.