Shiver me timbers! The harbours are under attack, mateys! - Sweeping legal ruling orders ISPs to block pirate sites

[Lightwreather]

Summary

A copyright battle has spawned a sweeping order demanding internet service providers block a set of pirate sites — one of the broadest such rulings to date.

As TorrentFreak recently reported, a New York district judge ruled in late April on a series of copyright lawsuits against three sites that rebroadcast mostly Hebrew-language television. The rightsholders demanded monetary damages from the site operators — who didn’t show up in court — and an injunction meant to prevent viewers from accessing the services.

Judge Katherine Polk Failla approved the request and ordered a voluminous list of ISPs to block Israeli-TV.com, Israel.tv, and Sdarot.com. The companies are required to block not only the current addresses but also any domain known to be “used in the future ... by any technological means available.” Users should instead be directed to a page that notifies them of the block.

It’s not just ISPs that are affected either. Web hosting providers, web designers, domain name registration services, and advertising companies — among others — are all barred from doing business with the sites.

 

Quotes

Quote

Copyright suits can ask for blocking orders. But it’s highly unusual for them to be this comprehensive, says Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel of the nonprofit Public Knowledge. “That scope of the injunction and listing that many players in it is beyond the norm,” she says. Among other things, third parties are supposed to get a chance to show up in court and contest blocking orders, which raises the barrier to demanding them. That doesn’t appear to have happened in this case.

Instead, as Mike Masnick of Techdirt outlines, the order is reminiscent of the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA-PIPA — a highly controversial bill that was scuttled after widespread protests in 2012.

“It is exactly what the content lobby has been pushing to get and explicitly lobbying for for years now. This is sort of a dream scenario for a lot of them,” says Rose. “Rightsholders want to be able to go into court and quickly and easily get one order that they could then hold out to the world that says: do not interact with this particular website.”

ISPs and other companies — or the defendants — could still contest the order. But it’s not clear the biggest players are going to. AT&T declined to comment on whether it would dispute the decision, and Verizon didn’t respond to a request for comment. (Charter didn’t immediately respond to a more recently made request.) Comcast also declined to say whether it would push back on the injunction but offered slightly more detail. “We only recently learned about it and the implications and are still examining it,” said spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice.

 

My thoughts

Huh, well Good luck with that. Seriously, good luck with that. The ports that harbour those that sail the high seas are quite hardy. They'll move to another place should one location be impractical. "Ah," but I hear you say, "The court ruling also states that ISPs should block all future domains." Well, it becomes a game of Whack-a-mole then. And when there upwards of a hundred moles, well I think you can see the issue. To be clear, I'm not advocating Piracy, you should always pay for the stuff you use when possible but the simple fact of the matter is Piracy will never fully go away.

 

Sources

TheVerge

TorrentFreak

Court docs (hosted by TorrentFreak) - One, Two, Three

TechDirt

[Helpful Tech Witch]

15 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

ou should always pay for the stuff you use when possible

unless its an EA game /s

[SupaKomputa]

There always be pirates, harr harr...

[SolarNova]

Cut off one head, two more shall takes its place !

 

Also .. VPN ..just saying.

 

Seriously, a government would have to put blanked bans of any software or service that protects privacy to outright enable preventative measures such as these to actually work. To do that would be a massive curtailing of an individuals rights.

 

So ..this is more of a self soothing gesture that makes said courts feel like they are actually doing something. Chances are those putting forth these orders actually have no clue on the subject matter, they're not experts on the matter so likely have no idea how ineffective they are being.

[darknessblade]

7 hours ago, Helpful Tech Wiard said:

unless its an EA game /s

Specifically games like Spore.

 

Where you have a limited amount of installs you can do

[jagdtigger]

Unbound in resolver mode+DNSSEC enabled, there goes the useless block...... (Switching away from ISP provided DNS also works, preferably to somehing that supports tls.)

[wanderingfool2]

hehe, feels like the lead is buried.

 

8 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

The companies are required to block not only the current addresses but also any domain known to be “used in the future ... by any technological means available.”

This is the headline/scary part of the ruling.  If it's just blocking the domain, that's perfectly okay with me.  Blocking all "future" access is one where it goes too far.

 

Not sure what happens if the defendants switch IP addresses and create a new website...as it would be impossible to claim they are the same people (so not sure the court order would apply).  Another issue though is what the ISP's are suppose to do.  They would effectively need to monitor all domains being presented with the IP address...redirect.  From there the ISP's would need to also put up a redirect on the IP address...but then that gets an issue of them literally performing a MITM attack.

 

It just seems like it's overly broad the order (in that it makes additional policing by saying future onto the ISP's).

 

12 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Unbound in resolver mode+DNSSEC enabled, there goes the useless block...... (Switching away from ftom ISP provided DNS also works, preferably to somehing that supports tls.)

Betting it's going to expand to all US based DNS servers.

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Betting it's going to expand to all US based DNS servers.

Unbound in resolver  mode queries the root servers, and there are dns servers outside the US....

[wanderingfool2]

21 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Unbound in resolver  mode queries the root servers, and there are dns servers outside the US....

Except that the DNS query result times will start getting high, given you now have to send packets over the ocean and back

[jagdtigger]

14 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Except that the DNS query result times will start getting high, given you now have to send packets over the ocean and back

.1 sec isnt the end of the world. IDK about the US ISP DNS servers but in my case the ISP server was junk. Didnt notice any slowdown when switched on resolver mode.... (Also there is an option to renew cache entries before they expire.)

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Except that the DNS query result times will start getting high, given you now have to send packets over the ocean and back

DNS forwarders cache returned results and so do clients, that's what the TTL is for. It'll be "slow" once then never.

[Taf the Ghost]

I would question the viability of the enforcement of the Order. Some ISPs will probably fight it just because it's overly broad and likely far outside of the Courts jurisdiction and authority.

[GhostRoadieBL]

I wouldn't disagree with the decision if it was linked to longer support or forced open sourcing of 'end of life' software, games, tv shows etc.

 

Take XBox game pass, recently removed games like FF6 thru 9 just because they wanted to (or square enix is downsizing) so any progress you made is tied to waiting for them to come back or start over. I know you can get them on steam and that's a huge benefit but it's just one example of what happens, which also happens to a ton of software you can only get through torrents since the company was purchased.

 

I can understand new stuff, but after 5-10 years who's paying $30-50 for a movie so they can watch it whenever they want without worrying it will change streaming services or just evaporate to the void.

[AnonymousGuy]

10 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I would question the viability of the enforcement of the Order. Some ISPs will probably fight it just because it's overly broad and likely far outside of the Courts jurisdiction and authority.

Agree.  This type of authority would have to come from legislation and not be at the whim of technically inept judging randomly creating blacklists of domains and then punting to ISPs to figure out how to make them permanently unavailable.  Effectively this is extending "punishment" to bystanders.  

[GhostRoadieBL]

8 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Agree.  This type of authority would have to come from legislation and not be at the whim of technically inept judging randomly creating blacklists of domains and then punting to ISPs to figure out how to make them permanently unavailable.  Effectively this is extending "punishment" to bystanders.  

This actually happened in Canada with Black Rifle coffee, their website was blocked nationally following a change in gun sale laws even though they have nothing to do with guns outside of being set up by veterans.

 

[Quackers101]

"freespeechlol"

 

But not great if the content you want to watch, is only accessed by pirated content or due to censorship etc. but those big pirates do be looking scary though!

[williamcll]

Thankfully someone has this massive list of GOG torrent links. I will die of old age before I finish playing all these games.

[Guest]

It's the US, their government treat copyright too seriously because the Hollywood lobbying elites control it, and the Hollywood elites decided to block pirate sites of... Israeli TV?

 

I really don't get the idea of why they should just block those specific sites other than just to maintain the US-Israel relationship.

[cluelessgenius]

are ISPs doing more than DNS blocking? because you could just set a different dns server in your router.