Germany and Pirate Sites
May 15, 2025
The United States is batting around site-blocking legislation called Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) by Representative Zoe Lofgren. The act takes US rights holders site blocking experience from overseas and transforms into a package for US use. What it means, according to TorrentFreak’s article: “Non-Transparency Resumed After Pirate Site Blacklist Publicly Exposed In Error,”
“Should it become law, FAPDA would allow rightsholders to obtain site blocking orders targeted at verified pirate sites, run by foreign or assumed foreign operators. The proposals as they stand today envision blocking orders that would apply to both ISPs and DNS resolvers, the latter an already controversial trend that has only recently shown momentum in Europe.”
In order to be effective, site-blocking tools must always adapt. It appears that FAPDA proposals are the template for US site blocking. Similar legislation called SOPA happened in 2012 but there wasn’t any historical precedence before, but now there is. The US is using Europe’s site-blocking as an example.
Germany has an administrative site that blocks pirate Web sites without direct legal oversight:
“A partnership between rightsholders and local ISPs saw the launch of the “Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet” (CUII) which is now responsible for handing down blocking instructions against sites that structurally infringe copyright.”
The CUII Web site publishes blocking recommendations and it is supposed to be private. It wasn’t! The Netzpolitik reported that Germany’s secret pirate blocking Web site has been publicly viewable for ten months.
People are also crying free speech violations, especially because there aren’t any transparency. Europe won’t be forthcoming with transparency is ISPs and rights holders aren’t required to have them.
Whitney Grace, May 15, 2025
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
