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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [techdirt.com]:

(Mis)Uses of Technology [techdirt.com]

As numerous Walled Culture posts attest, site blocking [walledculture.org] is in the vanguard of the actions by copyright companies against sites engaged in the unauthorized sharing of material. Over the past few months, this approach has become even more pervasive, and even more intrusive. For example, in France, the Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was forced to geoblock more than 400 sports streaming domain names [torrentfreak.com]. More worryingly, leading VPN providers were ordered to block similar sites [torrentfreak.com]. This represents another attack on basic Internet infrastructure [walledculture.org], something this blog has been warning about for years.

In Spain, LaLiga, the country’s top professional football league, has not only continued to block sites, it has even ignored attempts [torrentfreak.com] by the Vercel cloud computing service to prevent overblocking, whereby many other unrelated sites are knocked out too. As TorrentFreak reported:

Despite Vercel’s attempts to give LaLiga the blocks it wanted without harming other users, the football league ignored the new management system, and continued to demand excessively wide blocks. As Walled Culture has noted [walledculture.org], this is not some minor, fringe issue: overblocking could have serious social consequences. That’s something Cloudflare’s CEO underlined in the context of LaLiga’s actions. According to TorrentFreak [torrentfreak.com], he warned:

It’s only a matter of time before a Spanish citizen can’t access a life-saving emergency resource because the rights holder in a football match refuses to send a limited request to block one resource versus a broad request to block a whole swath of the Internet.

In India, courts are granting even more powerful site blocks at the request of copyright companies. For example, the High Court in New Delhi has granted a new type of blocking order significantly called a “superlative injunction [torrentfreak.com]”. The same court has issued orders to five domain registrars to block a number of sites, and to do so globally – not just in India [torrentfreak.com]. In America, meanwhile, there are renewed efforts to bring in site blocking laws, amidst fears that these too could lead to harmful overblocking [torrentfreak.com].

The pioneer of this kind of excessive site blocking is Italy, with its Piracy Shield [walledculture.org] system. As Walled Culture wrote recently, there are already moves to expand Piracy Shield [walledculture.org] that will make it worse in a number of ways. The overreach of Piracy Shield has prompted the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) to write to the European Commission, urging the latter to assess the legality of the Piracy Shield under EU law [torrentfreak.com]. And that, finally, is what the European Commission is beginning to do.

A couple of weeks ago, the Commission sent a letter [europa.eu] to Antonio Tajani, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. In it, the European Commission offered some comments on Italy’s notification of changes in its copyright law. These changes include “amendments in the Anti-Piracy Law that entrusted Agcom [the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees] to implement the automated platform later called the “Piracy Shield”.” In the letter, the European Commission offers its thoughts on whether Piracy Shield complies with the Digital Services Act (DSA), one of the key pieces of legislation that regulates the online world in the EU. The Commission wrote:

In other words, the Italian government cannot just vaguely invoke the DSA to justify Piracy Shield’s extended powers. The letter goes on:

This is a crucial point in the context of overblocking. Shutting down access to thousands, sometimes millions [walledculture.org] of unrelated sites as the result of a poorly-targeted injunction, clearly fails to take into account “the rights and legitimate interests of all third parties that may be affected by the order”. The European Commission also has a withering comment on Piracy Shield’s limited redress mechanism for those blocked in error:

The letter concludes by inviting “the Italian authorities to take into account the above comments in the final text of the notified draft and its implementation.” That “invitation” is, of course, a polite way of ordering the Italian government to fix the problems with Piracy Shield that the letter has just run through. They may be couched in diplomatic language, but the European Commission’s “comments” are in fact a serious slapdown to a bad law that seems not to be compliant with the DSA in several crucial respects. It will be interesting to see how the Italian authorities respond to this subtle but public reprimand.

Original Submission