European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage

https://torrentfreak.com/european-isps-want-rightsholders-held-accountable-for-overblocking-damage/

by Brajeshwar • 23 days ago

418 124 23 days ago

torrentfreak.com

throwa356262• 23 days ago

Such an obvious thing, should have been there from day 1.

The situation in Spain is particularly crazy. How can la liga have this much power over the Internet?

gonzalohm3• 23 days ago

In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time.

Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I hated that

dummydummy1234• 23 days ago

... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)

greenavocado2• 23 days ago

Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null

FireBeyond2• 23 days ago

Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".

gadrev• 23 days ago

It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible...

We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.

riffraff• 23 days ago

I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad.

We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.

microgpt7• 23 days ago

Close ties to the mafia. Same in Italy.

londons_explore• 23 days ago

The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers...

The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation.

bradley13• 23 days ago

It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.

Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always.

If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material.

Too much work? Tough...

nonethewiser7• 23 days ago

Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?

If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.

I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.

qweqwe142• 23 days ago

How do you know if something is child porn?

huijzer• 23 days ago

Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though

athrowaway3z• 23 days ago

Anything you want to censor has at least 5 stages:

Creator, first share (direct), second order sharing (public-ish website), third order sharing (indexed resharing), and finally the consumer wanting it presented.

In the way there are things we clearly want to censor for being awful, there are things we must never allow to be censored. Eg knowledge of a genocide.

But the solution kind of rights itself. To censor something you need as many actors as possible in that enormous graph of sharing nodes to clearly want to censor that thing we all agree we clearly want to censor. I.e. a public library doesn't censorship child porn because they are required to.

Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?

So yes this is censorship, but 'illegal' content is too vague.

We want to know about the censorship beyond the natural baseline.

Censorship, usually, means the extraordinary request for powers to control the web of communications - in the context of what and why.

holoduke• 23 days ago

Everyone into childporn use uncensored models/sites deeply hidden from the public. Every single part of censorship is having a bad effect on the common world where normal people try to operate normally. The ones caught at this levels are not the interesting ones you want to catch.

po1nt3• 23 days ago

You could just flag whatever you don't like as child porn. It would get taken down instantly and you'll get effectively silenced by presumption of guilt.

Yes you might appeal, but at that time your content might not be relevant and you will no be compensated for damages.

username_my1• 23 days ago

soon with the age verification laws, the mass surveillance laws coming

we'll have a great wall of Europe ... my guess is that they're following the Russian / Chinese model.

banning of VPN is a matter of time.

then the days of free or anonymous internet is behind us.

microgpt7• 23 days ago

you might have more success by thinking about things that are actually happening or about to happen instead of speculating so far.

We already have a great wall of Europe, it's implemented on the US side of the ocean by websites that are afraid to somehow get in GDPR trouble or (more likely) want to put pressure to repeal GDPR.

Did you know you can do that, by the way? You can block your website in Bumfuckistan citing bill AB1234 and if your site is big enough it puts pressure to repeal that bill no matter what it's about.

ButlerianJihad3• 23 days ago

censorship is bad. Always.

Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?

What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...

Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?

If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?

Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?

Cider9986• 23 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

axus• 23 days ago

Rick Santorum was a public figure, his name is fair game.

bawolff2• 23 days ago

If you want to talk in the american context, its not like they wrote the constitution yesterday, there is hundreds of years of juriprudence on the issue.

To be sure its not an easy question, but we aren't starting from zero here.

bawolff2• 23 days ago

It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.

Isn't it under penalty of purjury?

tgsovlerkhgsel• 23 days ago

Only in theory. If I remember correctly, the "penalty of perjury" is applied to only some small part of the claim, which makes it easy for all but the most blatantly malicious claims (and possibly even those) to get off scot free by claiming a honest mistake.

kg• 23 days ago

It's impossible for a victim to enforce this penalty, even if they hire a lawyer, in my experience.

robocat• 23 days ago

Penalty of perjury in what jurisdiction?

Even wholly within the US, perjury appears to be low cost: businesses make a tradeoff between legal risks and profits.

masklinn2• 23 days ago

Oh no, the only part under penalty of perjury is the complaining party misrepresenting their authorisation by the rights holder (17 USC § 512(c)(3)(A)(iv)).

So if you DMCA HN, claiming that this thread infringes on Moana the possible perjury would be for claiming to represent Disney.

Now in theory the content claims are made under the good faith standard (17 USC § 512(c)(3)(A)(v)), and in theory the complaining party could be held for damages, but in practice getting ahold of the complainant is very hard, and suing them for damage is often worse than the actual damage.

gortok• 23 days ago

Having gone through the court system for a civil matter, I can tell you that “get a judgment” is a lot of time and money in even the easiest of cases, and let’s go at it from the person’s end who has to fight this, and let’s just focus on cases it’s a big tech company vs. a mom-and-pop or just a random person — who hasn’t actually done anything wrong. The big company has the money to sue, and now all of a sudden if you don’t want a default judgment, you have to spend money on a lawyer to fight the lawsuit, and guess what? It’s not as if it’s free to fight a lawsuit. It’s expensive to fight it.

The merits win in a lawsuit only if you don’t run out of money first.

zoltrix303• 23 days ago

Serious question, what would the ramifications of an economic solution? If you appeal content removal and your challenge is validated, the platform then applies a financial penalty to the requester? It would reduce drastically the amounts of request and thus false positives?

Guvante• 23 days ago

Unfortunately the group that has the most control doesn't care.

The majority of anything around DMCA is likely legitimate complaints so dealing with it is weird, since making it more painful for content producers to protect themselves is unpopular.

Especially since you would need a bond system and penalties beyond actual damages (such as legal fees) since most of the worst cases have very nebulous actual damages.

john01dav• 23 days ago

Too much work? Tough...

Making justice available only to people with monetary (and in US courts at least, wealth is a strong predictor of outcome) and other relevant resources is not the kind of thing that I want society getting worse on.

DMCA enforcement of copyright is thus fundamentally a good law, and in my opinion should only be tweaked to deal with the pathological cases on platforms like YouTube, and even more so what's happening in YouTube.

Some mild disincentive against incorrect DMCA takedown requests being filed seems reasonable to me, as long as it scales with the level of inflicted damage. A few dollars per false claim seems like a good starting point to consider from. That makes a legitimate mistake by a human not a major issue, but also maked unleashing inaccurate mass bots and performing extremely overly broad blocking deeply unprofitable.

Of course, the broad EU blocks aren't governed by US's DMCA, but the basic incentive argument applies there too I think.

JoshTriplett3• 23 days ago

A few dollars per false claim seems like a good starting point to consider from.

False claims cause content to be taken down before the opportunity to respond. Timeliness has value. Even if the content is restored later, the damage has sometimes already been done. "a few dollars" is not reasonable. "The cost of the damage done, plus a further penalty" is closer to reasonable.

rstuart4133• 23 days ago

A few dollars per false claim seems like a good starting point to consider from.

A nominal fee to lodge a claim seems more practical. No courts, no lawyers, just a government web form that pay for itself. It won't stop vexatious claims, but it will stop mass speculative Hail Mary's.

someonebaggy5• 23 days ago

What does it actually cost to get a court order for something so trivial?

hgoel• 23 days ago

That just leads to a copyright system that favors big corpos even more than it does already.

expo98• 23 days ago

I hope so, in Spain you can't access anything that uses Cloudflare, even docker images, thanks to LaLiga's president bullshit

microgpt7• 23 days ago

It's also due to Cloudflare intentionally not policing its customers even a little bit, but i still side with CF - they're the less bad guys.

tialaramex3• 23 days ago

I think for Cloudflare it's both an obvious slippery slope - like, this isn't one of those dubious analogies where there seems to be an obvious bright line and the slippery slope argument seems far-fetched, the incredulity of non-soccer fans when the Spain situation is explained tells you everything you need to know.

And it's just technically much easier to not do this. If you do this, and somebody else doesn't they're undercutting you. The "bad guys" want that uninfringed service of course - but so does everybody else because it's cheaper.

I'd be interested to know, obviously people love football - the sport, the players, the teams at least in the abstract - but, La Liga itself, is this considered like holy the way football is, is it a slightly bureaucratic organisation that isn't as much respected and so if they start coming for individual fans it won't go so well, or are we talking almost FIFA-levels of "These are corrupt people, money vampires who drain €€€€ from our beautiful sport, I hope they all burn in hell" ???

bethekidyouwant• 23 days ago

“Policing its customers” what do you want cloud-flair to do?

throwawayffffas• 23 days ago

It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.

But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.

btasker• 23 days ago

they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.

Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff.

The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin.

Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed.

The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this

tialaramex3• 23 days ago

And importantly that rule meant that if your ISP doesn't have censorship filters, the anti-piracy people can't touch them. That's why Andrews and Arnold (aa.net.uk) is the way it is.

After all, who can say how much AA should spend to stop their customers from committing crimes? Should they spend $100 per customer? $100 per week? $100 per day? How much extra money are you required to spend to stop other people committing crimes?

For people with existing censorship capabilities the answer was oh that's basically free right? I mean you already have this capability so we'd just piggyback on that. But for AA it's an entirely open-ended question. If Hollywood wants to pay, let them propose how much they want to pay for this service. It's worth almost nothing to them, they know that, and so there won't be an offer.

someonebaggy5• 23 days ago

They had a court order to block it. Do you know what happens if you disobey a direct court order? There's no upper limit to the punishment you can receive for contempt of court.

croes• 23 days ago

Absolutely.

No such power without consequences if abused.

Put some skin in the game

mring33621• 23 days ago

Agreed

Enforcement should be a cost/benefit analysis.

RN, there is very little cost imposed on the alleged rightsholders, so they spam freely.

zuzululu• 23 days ago

the global trend is not good. in south korea the new law prevents anyone from posting memes of the president because they require public square operators to purchase AI hardware that is already expensive at inflated markup (with completely opaque RFP bidding process and no disclosure of beneficiaries) and every image and post be monitored for "fake news/disinformation" by a partisan government body created by the President. Bill C-22 in Canada, la Liga blocking cloudflare, UK requiring IDs....on an unrelated note Playstation store removing purchased games, zero day disclosures not being awarded so they end up in the black market leading to more data leaks....

this entire digital/internet industrial complex is beginning to show real issues. im hoping there is technology in the works that can give us back the old magic of the late 90s internet.

microgpt7• 23 days ago

Small networks maybe? Make a virtual network for you and some friends and don't let the public access it.

Arubis2• 23 days ago

This strikes me as the right move, but the timing isn't lost on me. Model training companies want easier access to data, and they have a lot of money and are growing their lobbying and political influence muscles.

The culture of the people should belong to _the people_. Let's make sure this doesn't just turn into a transfer of which small subset manages to profit from it.

braiamp• 23 days ago

The timing isn't lost on you, it's on the wrong galaxy. This is the regular requests for comments that the commission does on digital markets, the ISP's have been saying this since a while ago

In a new filing to the Commission’s ongoing assessment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, pointing out that the piracy blocking climate in some countries is getting more extreme. EuroISPA starts by explicitly referencing the Commission’s own conclusions. Its evaluation of the 2023 Recommendation on combating piracy of live events concluded that the measures had “limited positive effects” and did not lead to a substantial reduction in piracy.

They are literally saying the commission that the law is being applied in a lopsided way and to start doing the counter-balance of that.

Arubis2• 23 days ago

Hm. Am I understanding correctly that this is a repeated and periodic complaint, not a new thing being raised by ISPs? Most of my familiarity with ISP policies is from being stateside, where there's a large overlap in ownership between ISPs and media companies and predictable alignment in policies.

ekymz• 23 days ago

Good job

matheusmoreira• 23 days ago

Finally. "Rightsholders" have always been abusing the system, anything that applies a chilling effect on them is a good thing. But will it actually happen? Copyright monopolists always seem to get away with everything they do. I've kinda lost hope.

samgranieri• 23 days ago

The sheer amount of internet disruption that goes on in Spain during soccer matches is just absolutely insane. People who pay for internet service and use it responsibly should not have their service disrupted by people pirating soccer matches. I can’t imagine the investors of the internet companies in Spain are happy about this either.

snapplebobapple• 23 days ago

#metoo

6510• 23 days ago

Here is a dumb idea, lets do innocent until proven guilty. If you don't dispute the claim the content is taken down. If you do dispute it it stays up until guilt is confirmed, then you get fined and the content is taken down.

kazinator• 22 days ago

Why only rightsholders?

Non-rightsholders who submit fraudulent claims also cause blocking damage; they should be accountable also (i.e. sitting in jail).

European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage

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