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https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/26/italys-piracy-shield-moving-from-digital-farce-to-national-tragedy/>
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Walled Culture has been following the sorry saga of Italy’s automated
blocking system Piracy Shield for a year now. Blocklists are drawn up by
copyright companies, without any review, or the possibility of any objections,
and those blocks must be enforced within 30 minutes. Needless to say, such a
ham-fisted and biased approach to copyright infringement is already producing
some horrendous blunders.
For example, back in March,
Walled Culture reported that one of Cloudflare’s
Internet addresses had been blocked by Piracy Shield. There were over 40
million domains associated with the blocked address – which shows how this
crude approach can cause significant collateral damage to millions of sites not
involved in any alleged copyright infringement.
Every new system has teething troubles, although not normally on this scale.
But any hope that Italy’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie
nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), the body
running Piracy Shield, would have learned from the Cloudflare fiasco in order
to stop it happening again was dispelled by what took place in October.
TorrentFreak explains:
After blocking Cloudflare to prevent IPTV piracy just a few months ago, on
Saturday the rightsholders behind Piracy Shield ordered Italy’s ISPs to
block Google Drive. The subsequent nationwide blackout, affecting millions
of Italians, wasn’t just a hapless IP address blunder. This was the reckless
blocking of a Google.com subdomain that many 10-year-olds could identify as
being important. Reckless people and internet infrastructure, what could
possibly go wrong next?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
