The Internet activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which reports over 30,000 members, has slammed a new anti-piracy bill supported by the MPA, whose members include companies with notable anime footprints like Sony, Netflix and Disney.
Earlier this month, the EFF slammed the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) — a new bill tabled by U.S. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to bolster efforts to block foreign piracy sites in the U.S. The bill outlines a legal process for rightsholders to request that courts issue orders to service providers like ISPs, Verizon and AT&T, and DNS resolution providers like Google and Cloudflare, to block access to piracy sites. It’s also worth noting that Amazon, Disney and other major entertainment companies met to discuss anti-piracy solutions in private with Congressman Darrell Issa last month, who himself plans to table his own anti-piracy American Copyright Protection Act.
'Site Blocking Doesn't Work': Controversial U.S. Anti-Piracy Bill Could Cause Collateral Damage
While the bill has provisions to allow the court to conduct risk assessments into whether site-blocking orders would affect innocent sites, and leaves the method of blocking to the expertise of the service provider, the EFF argues «site blocking doesn’t work — and never will.» IP blocking would be a likely method, and the EFF outlined how many unrelated websites around the world share the same IP address, possibly meaning that «blocking one target can mean blocking thousands of unrelated sites.» It highlighted multiple examples of collateral damage in Austria, Russia and the U.S.
While service providers are allowed to suspend blocking in this case, they wouldn’t be financially liable for disruptions to innocent websites under FADPA, which may incentivize complacent or reckless site blocking. Depending on the court order, if a blacklisted piracy site tries to evade blocking, Lofgren’s bill summary suggests that rightsholders may be able to skip further court visits to instruct ISPs directly to block the new site, which may be open to abuse.
Piracy Site Rebranding & VPNs May Be Seen as Easy Solutions to Site-Blocking Measures
The EFF also argues that evading site blocking orders is trivial, as sites can simply migrate all their content to a new domain in hours. This was seen when Aniwatch rebranded to HiAnime, believed to have been done after a site-blocking order was issued in India. Nevertheless, rightsholders may see this as a win regardless, as moving sites may disrupt communities and other previously enjoyed perks, which may be enough to push users to legal avenues. Nevertheless, as the EFF adds, customers eager to pirate can easily use VPNs to circumvent site blocking. Many VPN companies offer their services for free in exchange for unknowingly selling user data to third parties or packaging the service with malware.
Other worrisome provisions in FADPA include expedited site-blocking court orders for imminent live events, which can be issued without even waiting for the site to defend itself. Outside live events, rightsholders can request that a granted site-blocking order be extended for 12 months. The EFF concluded its statement by accusing private actors of building a «new American censorship system by letting private actors get dangerous infrastructure-level control over internet access,» adding, «If they don’t [remember how site blocking failed previously], they’re going to find out the hard way. Again,» referencing the failed SOPA and PIPA bills of the last decade.
