The fight against piracy has tightened in the last two years, especially with regard to pirated IPTV to watch football and other live content such as television channels. These services allow users to connect to broadcasts of legal content, usually at a price much lower than the official alternative. Football leagues have determined that this technology is their biggest threat yet, and have urged governments to implement swift measures, sometimes regardless of the possible consequences.
The best example of this new policy is the Piracy Shield, the blocking system launched last year in Italy and which, in just a few months, has managed to get into several controversies over the extreme control that a private company can have over the Internet. The Piracy Shield has already received a lot of criticism, some even coming from AGCOM, the telecommunications regulator that has become the main supporter of the system.
The possibility of this system being copied by other countries is very real, with some voices coming from LaLiga asking that it also be implemented in Spain. Before that happens, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) has asked in a letter to the European Commission (via TorrentFreak) to put an end to the Piracy Shield and verify its legality.
The CCIA is made up of some of the largest Internet companies, including Google, Amazon and Cloudflare, which are already some of the most affected by Piracy Shield. In fact, one of the main criticisms made of the system is that It’s too “gross” and represents a threat, both to these companies and to the general public.
Piracy Shield works with a blocking system at the DNS (name server) and IP level. Using this system, rights owners can send requests to all carriers to block a specific IP address or range of addresses; The process cannot take more than 30 minutes, a measure designed to prevent pirates from finishing watching the game illegally. However, this also opens the door to abuse, since IP addresses to be blocked are not checkedneither by a judge nor by the operator itself, which must only follow the orders of the rights owner; That opens the door to a problem of excessive blocking of legal services and pages.
The CCIA has clarified that this excessive blocking warning is not a hypothesis, but something real that is already happening. To demonstrate this, the organization mentions an incident last October, when Google Drive was blocked by Piracy Shield; As a result, the entire service remained inaccessible in Italy for three hours, and up to 12 hours later 13.% of users were still blocked. Although AGCOM claimed that it was a ‘simple mistake’, the fact that a vital service as important as this is blocked so easily is proof that Piracy Shield is “too forceful an instrument” to combat the problem of piracy.
As if that were not enough, the CCIA affirms that Piracy Shield does not have sufficient safeguards or transparency about how it works, and that makes fixing its errors much more difficult. Another thorny detail has to do with the development of the system itself; Piracy Shield was a ‘gift’ from Serie A, the Italian football league, to AGCOM, and is one of the few organizations that has permission to use the system. That raises questions about whether the system considers the interests of all rights owners.
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The CCIA calls on AGCOM to, at a minimum, implement verification protocols that avoid these problems and provide more transparency. But the real ‘bombshell’ comes with the request to the European Commission that ask the Italian government to stop this system immediately and withdraw the law that made it possible.
The organization believes that Piracy Shield violates several European laws and should be withdrawn, especially after the latest amendments adding obligations that it believes contradict the new Digital Services Law put in place last year. Specifically, one of the amendments requires Internet companies to report all illegal activity, including any copyright infringement, under penalty of up to one year in prison. The CCIA believes that this measure goes far beyond the requirements of European law and will affect freedom of expression and online innovation.
