Walled Culture has been writing about Italy’s Piracy Shield system for a year now. It was clear from early on that its approach of blocking Internet addresses (IP addresses) to fight alleged copyright infringement – particularly the streaming of football matches – was flawed, and risked turning into another fiasco like France’s failed Hadopi law. The central issue with Piracy Shield is summed up in a recent post on the Disruptive Competition Blog:
The problem is that Italy’s Piracy Shield enables the blocking of content at the IP address and DNS level, which is particularly problematic in this time of shared IP addresses. It would be similar to arguing that if in a big shopping mall, in which dozens of shops share the same address, one shop owner is found to sell bootleg vinyl records with pirated music, the entire mall needs to be closed and all shops are forced to go out of business.
As that post points out, Italy’s IP blocking suffers from several underlying problems. One is overblocking, which has already happened, as Walled Culture noted back in March. Another issue is lack of transparency:
The Piracy Shield that has been implemented in Italy is fully automated, which prevents any transparency on the notified IP addresses and lacks checks and balances performed by third parties, who could verify whether the notified IP addresses are exclusively dedicated to piracy (and should be blocked) or not.
Piracy Shield isn’t working, and causes serious collateral damage, but instead of recognising this, its supporters have doubled down, and have just convinced the Italian parliament to pass amendments making it even worse, reported here by TorrentFreak:
VPN and DNS services anywhere on planet earth will be required to join Piracy Shield and start blocking pirate sites, most likely at their own expense, just like Italian ISPs are required to do already.
…
Moving forward, if pirate sites share an IP address with entirely innocent sites, and the innocent sites are outnumbered, ISPs, VPNs and DNS services will be legally required to block them all.
A new offence has been created that is aimed at service providers, including network access providers, who fail to report promptly illegal conduct by their users to the judicial authorities in Italy or the police there. Maximum punishment is not just a fine, but imprisonment for up to one year. Just why this is absurd is made clear by this LinkedIn comment by Diego Ciulli, Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy, Google Italy (translation by DeepL):
Under the label of ‘combating piracy’, the Senate yesterday approved a regulation obliging digital platforms to notify the judicial authorities of all copyright infringements – present, past and future – of which they become aware. Do you know how many there are in Google’s case? Currently, 9,756,931,770.
In short, the Senate is asking us to flood the judiciary with almost 10 billion URLs – and foresees jail time if we miss a single notification.
If the rule is not corrected, the risk is to do the opposite of the spirit of the law: flooding the judiciary, and taking resources away from the fight against piracy.
The new law will make running an Internet access service so risky that many will probably just give up, reducing consumer choice. Freedom of speech will be curtailed, online security weakened, and Italy’s digital infrastructure will be degraded. The end result of this law will be an overall impoverishment of Italian Internet users, Italian business, and the Italian economy. And all because of one industry’s obsession with policing copyright at all costs
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft