The massive blockade of pages has arrived in Spain thanks to the sentence won by LaLiga and Telefónica at the end of last year, which allows them to order operators to limit access to IP addresses instead of domains as until now. As a result, many websites and legal services that share direction are blocked at the same time.
The result of this mass block is not a surprise for anyone who is up to date with the fight against piracy; There is nothing more to look at a very close country, Italy, where they have been using the Piracy Shield system for more than a year to block pages and services, many of them completely legal.
Piracy Shield, designed by the Calcio League and implemented by the highest Italian telecommunications authority, AGCOM, allows football rights owners order the blocking of pages and services directly to the operators and without judicial approval; If it is familiar, it is for a good reason: last year Javier Tebas dropped that Spain could impose a similar model, but it was not necessary to wait thanks to the decision of the Commercial Court number 6 of Barcelona.
The implementation of Piracy Shield in Italy has not been well received, or by defense organizations of Internet users or by some of the main companies in the sector, including Google and Cloudflare. And now, AGCOM has responded to criticism, although perhaps not in the way these organizations would have wanted.
As you collect TorrentfreakAGCOM has published the new “technical and operational requirements” of Piracy Shield, basically an update of the rules to follow for the use of the system. Some of the changes refer to the amendment to the original law that was approved by the Italian Congress last year, as the obligation that the VPN and DNS services in addition to web search engines They also perform the blockade, which until now was mandatory only for operators.
In this way, all services that offer access to the Internet content in some way will have to register with Piracy Shield, “regardless of where they are located”, and even if they are not directly involved in the access of a pirate site. In other words, this will force Google to block websites within 30 minutesif you don’t want to suffer legal consequences and even prison sentences for your employees.
There are already VPN services, which offer a privacy layer to users, which have announced that They can no longer offer their services in the countryso the consequences for privacy and freedom of Internet access in Italy can be noticed in the coming weeks.
Another important change affects the blockade of legal pages, which have already suffered services such as Google Drive and many small blogs and services that share direction with pirate services. For the first time, AGCOM seems to admit that this problem existssomething that until now has categorically denied despite the complaints of the affected users; However, its solution can be insufficient, because it depends on the owners of the rights.
To begin with, for the first time a limitation is imposed on the duration of the blockages, which until now was indefinite, A ‘only’ six months; But it is still indefinite if the direction continues to offer pirate content. In other words, the blockade of pirate pages is indefinite, and the blockade of legal pages is six months, something that will probably be of little comfort for those affected.
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At least, AGCOM has ‘dared’ to ask the owners of the rights that “Respect maximum diligence and maximum rigor” When ordering services that want to close, and have a “criterion of proportionality and reasonableness.” However, it does not include any punishment or consequence for ignoring these criteria, and in fact, the amendment to the law protects both AGCOM and companies in case of excessive blockage that affects fundamental rights such as information.
AGCOM continues to ask the owners to consider whether the IP address offers “predominantly” pirate content before ordering their blockage, and makes explicit mention to services such as Cloudflare, in which several services can share the same address. In that case, if there is no “certainty of the prevailing nature” of pirate content, So it shouldn’t be blocked. In the event that the owners of the rights are not safe, they should consult directly with AGCOM. Therefore, it is unlikely that legal pages blockages will end, at least, for now.
