For a long time, pirate site blocking was regarded as a topic most U.S. politicians would rather avoid.
This lingering remnant of the SOPA debacle drove copyright holders to focus on the introduction of blocking efforts in other countries instead, and not unsuccessfully.
More than 14 years after the last serious try, site-blocking calls have gained momentum once again.
As we reported in early April, lawmakers, including Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Senator Tillis (R-NC) are working on a unified, bipartisan site-blocking bill. Both sides initially started working on their own bills, FADPA and Block BEARD, but together they will have a stronger front.
MPA Flags Live Sports Piracy Challenge
The site blocking lobby has mostly taken place behind closed doors. Slowly but gradually, however, stakeholders are also commenting in public. This week, the Motion Picture Association used World IP Day to make a fresh case for U.S. site-blocking legislation.
In a blog post, MPA Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel Karyn Temple addressed the planned U.S. site-blocking push, with a particular focus on live sports. According to Temple, these live events deserve all the protection they can get due to their time-sensitive nature.
“All forms of online piracy are harmful. But live sports piracy is uniquely corrosive. Matches and live events are extremely time sensitive—their value drops sharply after that final whistle blows, the clock runs out, and the winning team is announced,” Temple writes.
The MPA, ACE, and others have already booked some decent successes on this front. Most notable is the takedown of a massive Streameast-branded live sports piracy network last year. While that was a major win, the original Streameast operation and many other sports piracy threats remained online.
MPA, ACE, and other stakeholders will do their best to address these and other piracy threats through their enforcement efforts. However, they also hope that U.S. lawmakers will also offer a helping hand by implementing site-blocking legislation.
Congress Should Create a Site Blocking Tool
Temple recognizes that Congress is trying to bridge the gaps and get site blocking passed. This is much needed and long overdue, she argues, pointing out that dozens of other countries have similar powers in place.
“To truly protect American sports fans, teams, and rightsholders in the era of live piracy, the U.S. Congress should create a judicially supervised website blocking tool similar to those proven to work in over 55 nations around the world, including many of our strongest allies,” Temple writes.
“By blocking access to lawless foreign piracy sites from inside the U.S., judicial site blocking shuts down piracy in real time, critical in all cases but especially so in the case of live sports events,” she adds.
MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President notes that more than 28,000 websites are now blocked globally in these countries, without sharing further detail.
To get a complete picture of the global site-blocking efforts, we asked the MPA for more information about the 55 countries that were mentioned, but that request remained unanswered. There is no doubt, however, that site blocking is relatively widespread, particularly in Europe.
Unintended Consequences
Thus far, there hasn’t been a lot of public opposition against the U.S. site-blocking plans from intermediaries. Internet providers remain silent on the issues, and the same applies to large DNS resolvers such as Google, Cisco, and Cloudflare, who will likely be targeted as well.
These intermediaries might wait with a formal response until they know what the final text of the law will be that Congress will have to decide on.
According to MPA’s Karyn Temple, there is little to be concerned about. She suggests that unintended consequences, affecting free speech, are no longer much of an issue after years of foreign site-blocking experience.
“While questions were once raised about unintended consequences or the impact of site blocking tools on free speech, it is now clear based on well over a decade of experience around the globe, that we can establish a safe, effective, judicial site blocking remedy that protects consumers, distributors, and rightsholders, without any meaningful risk to lawful expression and participation online,” Temple writes.
This is partly true when looking at countries such as Belgium, where site blocking is fully transparent and limited to domain names. However, recent site-blocking efforts in Spain and Italy have shown that IP address blocking can harm many legitimate sites and services, if they target shared server infrastructure.
How risk-free the American site-blocking proposal will be depends on the details, which, thus far, have yet to be finalized.
