This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Industry People Legal
Web-blocking on the agenda in both Switzerland and Australia, but not without critics
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 1 July 2014
While web-blocking has become a routine tool in the content industries’ battle against online piracy in a handful of jurisdictions, including the UK, the practice is being considered anew in some other countries, including Switzerland and Australia.
Swiss copyright law hasn’t proven very helpful in helping the content industries battle online piracy, with individuals downloading unlicensed content from file-sharing networks not actually liable for infringement, and strict privacy rules making it hard for rights owners to legally monitor the unauthorised distribution of their content.
But in response to pressure from both the copyright industries and other governments, who reckon that piracy is not only rife within Switzerland, but also that global file-sharing operations are able to base themselves in the country too, new proposals are now in development, though it could be late 2015 before they are with legislators for actual consideration.
According to Torrentfreak, individual file-sharers who download content will still be free from copyright liabilities, but uploaders will not, and the law will be changed to make it easier to identify and go after those uploading unlicensed content into file-sharing networks or cyber-lockers, though only after an ISP has sent them a cease and desist style warning letter first.
In addition to that, and some refinements to the takedown obligations of ISPs, search engines and user-upload sites, similar to those in US copyright law, web-blocking will also be considered by those drafting the new proposals, though only for “serious cases” where sites are hosting “obviously illegal content or sources”.
As in the UK and elsewhere, the web-blocking system would enable rights owners (and possibly, as in Italy, the authorities themselves) to seek web-blocking notices against sites that prolifically infringe, forcing ISPs to stop their customers from accessing those sites, where possible.
Of course web-blocking will always have only a limited impact on people actually accessing illegal content, and critics of the approach would argue that it’s a very limited impact. Partly because new file-sharing services launch all the time, and mainly because proxy sites that are easily discoverable on search engines help even the only mildly web-savvy user find the sites that have been blocked.
Though supporters of web-blocking, while accepting that there will always be limits, reckon that the effectiveness of the blockades could be greatly increased if the Googles of this world could be persuaded (or forced) to play a more proactive role in ensuring that shortcuts to websites blocked by the courts do not appear in their search results.
In Australia, the country’s Attorney-General recently said that both web-blocks and three-strikes were now being considered by the government there. And in response, Steven Dalby, the Chief Regulatory Officer of the country’s second largest ISP, iiNet, has now posted a blog very critical of the notion of web-blocking.
The company has had battles with the content industries before over the role net firms should or should not play in the battle against piracy, and in his post Dalby argues that measures like web-blocking are just things politicians sign-up to in a desperate bid to look like they are doing something to help the content industries, when in fact web-blocks achieve nothing.
“We know the pointlessness of simply blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, when they can change their address in minutes”, he writes. “The internet has no gate that we can put a padlock on”.
Continuing: “Instead of addressing the reasons why Australians illegally download movies and TV shows, the government instead seems determined to be seen to be ‘doing something’ to ISPs while defending, at all costs, the business model of the Hollywood movie houses. The clear hint from the Attorney General is that his plan includes government-mandated roadblocks for popular BitTorrent search engines like The Pirate Bay, even though these blocks are easy to overcome”.
You can read Dalby’s full blog post here.
