9 ms·

Canada Proposes New Regime to Block and Deindex Pirate Sites

100 points by curmudgeon22 6y ago

gentleman11 6y ago
After blocking the pirate torrent sites, will they block torrent p2p traffic in general or information about torrents or GitHub projects for foss torrent software? How to articles? Will they block VPNs used to get around this? Will tor go offline because it enables piracy? Maybe this is a good law but there are a lot of bad versions of it
throwawaysea 6y ago
> In addition to site-blocking and search engine de-indexing, courts should also be able to order online service providers to prevent infringing content from being re-uploaded, or to suspend or terminate access to infringing customers. Does this mean the courts would permanently terminate someone’s access to the Internet? If so, why stop there? “You used this electricity to power your computer and this water supply to stay hydrated during your criminal activities, so we are banning access to both for life”. It’s also chilling to see deindexing from search engines proposed. Canada has free speech problems already, for example recently with a parent being prevented from speaking to the public about his situation (https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/father-gagged-found-guilty-family-violence-calling-trans-daughter/ https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/father-gagged-found-gui...), where he wants to stop his daughter (a minor) from receiving life altering procedures without his consent. That suppression of speech is authoritarian enough, but in the future I could see this proposed anti-piracy law setting a precedent for deindexing news, opinions, studies, and other content that run afoul of their ever-expanding definitions of “hate speech”.
- zaksoup 6y ago
  Please don't compare overreach in IP enforcement to rejection of transphobia.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Please don’t compare a parent exercising their core parental rights (by questioning their immature and impressionable child’s beliefs, and by seeking to stop life altering procedures being applied forcefully to their child) to a “phobia”. Children are easily influenced by social trends, and are too young to consent to anything, and parents still ultimately control what is right and not right for their children. You either support their rights or you are against parental rights broadly and think children are the property of the state. But leaving that aside it is completely unethical, immoral, and authoritarian to prevent the father from calling his daughter as exactly that, or from bringing public attention to this absurd court ruling due to the court’s gag order. It’s the opposite of how any free society should operate, and the prevention of that speech is very similar to court-forced deindexing. Both are suppression of information.
  - grammarprofess 6y ago
    He just wants the kid to wait until 18 to mitigate regret, remorse. This story is honestly very sad.
    - Fogest 6y ago
      The UK had a similar problem where they let people under 18 get these surgeries and now they have cases of people suing the government because they regret the choices the government/parents allowed them to make before they were 18. It's pretty well-researched and understood peoples brains are not fully developed before 18, often not even in the early 20's. We already know you are not good at long-term decision making when young and not good at fully understanding long term consequences of actions. There are reasons why criminals under 18 are often treated much differently in the legal system and why that criminal history before 18 often doesn't extend past 18. We know kids do dumb shit and that's why there are legal protections in place for it. So it's insane to me how the government has tried to silence a parent for speaking out and has basically forced him to allow a child to do something like this and he gets no say. It's insane both how he is being silenced and how this is even happening in the first place. So I agree with this case being extremely relevant to the topic of website blocking. Because who is to say once a law like this in in place it doesn't start to get extended to infringing on other kinds of free speech and things the government doesn't like? From my understanding our free speech laws already are not as strong as America and I think we should all be opposed to anything that starts to breech what we do have, like these new laws.
errantspark 6y ago
As an individual what can I do to most effectively stop this bullshit? The constant overreach and expansion of IP law disastrous for humans. I want it to stop. Who do I donate to? Where do I march? I want to effect real change. I'm increasingly uncomfortable keeping my head down about this. It needs to be addressed, this concern needs to be signal-boosted somehow among the majority of people who just don't fucking give a shit. People shouldn't be okay with this. Most people are completely oblivious to the second and third order effects that are hurting them as a result of the INSANE IP laws that are on the books now. Is there any hope for real change? I'm ready to start donating some double digit percentage of my income for a start. My time too.
- alfl 6y ago
  I would usually recommend OpenMedia.ca but they seem not to have a position paper up on this yet. Still, I am bugging them about this and assuming they’ll take action.
  - Fogest 6y ago
    They usually have been pretty opposed to this kind of stuff in the past so I assume that will hold true for this case, especially considering their name "OpenMedia" kinda runs counter to this proposed change.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  The Green Party of Canada has a record of opposing such IP laws, I doubt throwing money at the major parties will change their stance unless you're secretly part of the Dave Thompson family. If you're opposed to switching party affiliation, the EFF is probably what you're looking for.
  - errantspark 6y ago
    I'm a US national these days, but I'm speaking more generally here. I donate to the EFF and I've donated to OpenMedia.ca as well in response to the other comment and while I'm aware that every bit helps help I'm concerned it's not enough, and that these organizations aren't focused enough on fighting the evils of IP law. I guess I'm saying I'm increasingly sure that this is the hill I want to die on. I want to do more than just donate. I want to get something done. I am ready to let this issue live constantly in my head as more than something that makes me mad. I want to fix it. This needs to change. The narrative needs to change. P.S. Louis Rossman's campaign for the Right to Repair is probably a good place to toss some money. P.P.S. To be clear I don't think we should abolish IP law entirely, just turn down the volume like 70%.
ShaneMcGowan 6y ago
They blocked pirate bay and others in ireland in 2009 and all it did was stop the less than tech savvy from accessing them, and those people weren't torrenting content anyway. This isn't going to change anything
lstamour 6y ago
It’s funny, if you had told me this was going to be introduced when DMCA was, I would have said Canadians would literally switch ISPs in order to avoid this. Now, I’m not so sure. Content blocking on YouTube and the occasional DMCA takedown notice on a Google web search tend to be the only hints you get of piracy online. Most people used to pirate all kinds of media, now we’ve Spotify and YouTube and Netflix and Disney+, etc. It’s never been easier to skip the physical disc and listen or watch media for free. That said, I could see unintended consequences. For example, this might be intended for piracy but we should keep in mind that our ISPs are often the ones owning significant media properties in Canada. Imagine Bell Canada getting the green light to block piracy services and deciding that any service which lets you watch content internationally, such as a VPN service, should be blocked in Canada and the content along with it? At what point would ISPs interpret this as a way to protect their IP-based business models? And at what point might the system open up to DMCA or YouTube style content strikes vs proper determination of copyright infringement. I’d be furious if GitHub repos started disappearing when tools, especially for education, are distinct from copyrighted materials being shared. I could even imagine a future where adblockers are considered copyright infringement because they modify the page or stream that the rights holder intended to serve. Once you allow ISPs to meddle with traffic on their own, they might not know where to stop, given a few decades.
- Fogest 6y ago
  This is always the main problem with these things. It sounds like a small and maybe even could be argued as a "fair" set of regulations/laws to propose, but the problem is that it opens up the box and often the line of where it stops starts to get fuzzy. Rogers and Bell are ISPs, cable/satelite providers, phone providers, control most of the major news networks (on radio and tv) as well as produce a lot of content and own streaming services. They are overall incredibly biased against illegal content online and have a huge stake in that. I don't think it makes sense for the same company who produces content and controls a lot of the media to also be the ones blocking "pirate" content. I wonder how this works with the ISP's that buy internet access wholesale from Bell and Rogers. For example my ISP is pretty small and I don't even think they forward those intimidating letters from production studios nor do I think they would care to enforce random IPs/sites to block. They are just too small of an operation to care/worry about this and wasting money on it. So will Bell and Rogers end up just blocking it on their end and not even giving these wholesale buyers a chance to manage the network? Overall I really do not trust Bell or Rogers and I do not trust them with blocking things. I really do not want to have to end up using a VPN connected to another country all the time simply to avoid blockades all over the web. Overall I feel like this just opens the box to further blocking of things not specifically piracy related. You give the government/ISP's a CM and they are going to ask for a meter later.
lwansbrough 6y ago
If you have comments for the Canadian government on this matter, an email is provided on this page: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00192.html https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00192.html Apparently your comment may be made public, FYI. I encourage everyone to make your voice heard, we’ve all had our interactions with pirated media. I learned graphic design after pirating my first copy of Photoshop, now Adobe has a customer for life. Think about how you can demonstrate the tangible (and intangible) value of piracy on the economy and society as a whole. The value is obvious for us, but clearly less obvious to lawmakers. Also worth noting that the most effective piracy measures have come from market forces: competition with the actual process of piracy. Netflix has effectively eliminated the need for movie piracy and did so simply by providing a simpler option. They use industry developed DRM. Who needs government enforcement of IP?
0-_-0 6y ago
I believe the UK tried to do the same thing, but these blocks are easily circumvented. You can just go to unblockit.club (or whatever the name is at at the time) and access many of these sites.
yummybear 6y ago
Deindexing? Oh please do - piracy will survive fine without. Even better - we’ll do it in the shadows as we previously did.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Remember the old days, got an FTP server IP address on IRC and it had a text file with details of more FTP servers. Then you would log in and look for stuff. I remember the excitement when you log in to incoming and there is a ton of stuff. Then you quickly have to choose what to download, as the dial-up is ticking. I wish we gone back to those times.
  - imdsm 6y ago
    The discovery of the old internet, where it truly felt like websites weren't always online, where you were connecting to individual machines, and where everything felt like it was a constantly changing landscape, were the best of days.
varispeed 6y ago
Ideally all sites should be deindexed, then maybe companies like Google would cease to exist and all this tracking nonsense would end. Just daydreaming...
arghimapirate 6y ago
Don't most people who pirate these days use a VPN anyways? I don't see how this is going to do anything.
standardUser 6y ago
They'd have to block sites that tell you how to work around their efforts to block sites. And that's not going to happen anytime soon in the West. So it's essentially more theater.
- newsclues 6y ago
  They work with big platforms to keep the information hidden if they can’t stamp it out completely. On Reddit there was a community for cannabis delivery that is geobanned in Canada once legalization happened to crush the illicit competition.
  - standardUser 6y ago
    But what's to stop someone putting up a website with instructions on accessing a Tor site or Discord server or an IRC channel?
TeeMassive 6y ago
Wasting all those resources for old industries that failed to modernize while at the same time the people named in the Panama Papers have been subject to no investigations.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Deindexing/blocking these sites is a reasonable step. Australia did so in 2018, resulting in a 5% increase to visits to legal sites: https://www.mpa-apac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Australia-Site-Blocking-Summary-January-2020.pdf https://www.mpa-apac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Australi... It seems unreasonable to have websites openly flouting copyright law. Additionally, for software like games, the files are usually full of malware.
- mantap 6y ago
  What is Google if not a website that openly flouts copyright law? I don't remember Google getting license to store my website in their index or to show my images in Google Images. I don't mind, of course, but it goes to show that the whole thing is bogus and a different set of laws apply depending on how much money you have.
dang 6y ago
Discussed recently: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821388 - April 2021 (90 comments) Actually it's rather unclear whether there's even a proposal.
butz 6y ago
Is it just me, or access to legal content is getting more complicated? How about putting all those lobbying funds for a good use and building a single platform that allows anyone to access movies, TV shows etc. for a decently priced subscription, without region blocking shenanigans?

100 points by curmudgeon22 6y ago

After blocking the pirate torrent sites, will they block torrent p2p traffic in general or information about torrents or GitHub projects for foss torrent software? How to articles? Will they block VPNs used to get around this? Will tor go offline because it enables piracy? Maybe this is a good law but there are a lot of bad versions of it

throwawaysea 6y ago

> In addition to site-blocking and search engine de-indexing, courts should also be able to order online service providers to prevent infringing content from being re-uploaded, or to suspend or terminate access to infringing customers. Does this mean the courts would permanently terminate someone’s access to the Internet? If so, why stop there? “You used this electricity to power your computer and this water supply to stay hydrated during your criminal activities, so we are banning access to both for life”. It’s also chilling to see deindexing from search engines proposed. Canada has free speech problems already, for example recently with a parent being prevented from speaking to the public about his situation (https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/father-gagged-found-guilty-family-violence-calling-trans-daughter/ https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/father-gagged-found-gui...), where he wants to stop his daughter (a minor) from receiving life altering procedures without his consent. That suppression of speech is authoritarian enough, but in the future I could see this proposed anti-piracy law setting a precedent for deindexing news, opinions, studies, and other content that run afoul of their ever-expanding definitions of “hate speech”.

zaksoup 6y ago
Please don't compare overreach in IP enforcement to rejection of transphobia.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Please don’t compare a parent exercising their core parental rights (by questioning their immature and impressionable child’s beliefs, and by seeking to stop life altering procedures being applied forcefully to their child) to a “phobia”. Children are easily influenced by social trends, and are too young to consent to anything, and parents still ultimately control what is right and not right for their children. You either support their rights or you are against parental rights broadly and think children are the property of the state. But leaving that aside it is completely unethical, immoral, and authoritarian to prevent the father from calling his daughter as exactly that, or from bringing public attention to this absurd court ruling due to the court’s gag order. It’s the opposite of how any free society should operate, and the prevention of that speech is very similar to court-forced deindexing. Both are suppression of information.
- grammarprofess 6y ago
  He just wants the kid to wait until 18 to mitigate regret, remorse. This story is honestly very sad.
  - Fogest 6y ago
    The UK had a similar problem where they let people under 18 get these surgeries and now they have cases of people suing the government because they regret the choices the government/parents allowed them to make before they were 18. It's pretty well-researched and understood peoples brains are not fully developed before 18, often not even in the early 20's. We already know you are not good at long-term decision making when young and not good at fully understanding long term consequences of actions. There are reasons why criminals under 18 are often treated much differently in the legal system and why that criminal history before 18 often doesn't extend past 18. We know kids do dumb shit and that's why there are legal protections in place for it. So it's insane to me how the government has tried to silence a parent for speaking out and has basically forced him to allow a child to do something like this and he gets no say. It's insane both how he is being silenced and how this is even happening in the first place. So I agree with this case being extremely relevant to the topic of website blocking. Because who is to say once a law like this in in place it doesn't start to get extended to infringing on other kinds of free speech and things the government doesn't like? From my understanding our free speech laws already are not as strong as America and I think we should all be opposed to anything that starts to breech what we do have, like these new laws.

errantspark 6y ago

As an individual what can I do to most effectively stop this bullshit? The constant overreach and expansion of IP law disastrous for humans. I want it to stop. Who do I donate to? Where do I march? I want to effect real change. I'm increasingly uncomfortable keeping my head down about this. It needs to be addressed, this concern needs to be signal-boosted somehow among the majority of people who just don't fucking give a shit. People shouldn't be okay with this. Most people are completely oblivious to the second and third order effects that are hurting them as a result of the INSANE IP laws that are on the books now. Is there any hope for real change? I'm ready to start donating some double digit percentage of my income for a start. My time too.

alfl 6y ago
I would usually recommend OpenMedia.ca but they seem not to have a position paper up on this yet. Still, I am bugging them about this and assuming they’ll take action.
- Fogest 6y ago
  They usually have been pretty opposed to this kind of stuff in the past so I assume that will hold true for this case, especially considering their name "OpenMedia" kinda runs counter to this proposed change.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
The Green Party of Canada has a record of opposing such IP laws, I doubt throwing money at the major parties will change their stance unless you're secretly part of the Dave Thompson family. If you're opposed to switching party affiliation, the EFF is probably what you're looking for.
- errantspark 6y ago
  I'm a US national these days, but I'm speaking more generally here. I donate to the EFF and I've donated to OpenMedia.ca as well in response to the other comment and while I'm aware that every bit helps help I'm concerned it's not enough, and that these organizations aren't focused enough on fighting the evils of IP law. I guess I'm saying I'm increasingly sure that this is the hill I want to die on. I want to do more than just donate. I want to get something done. I am ready to let this issue live constantly in my head as more than something that makes me mad. I want to fix it. This needs to change. The narrative needs to change. P.S. Louis Rossman's campaign for the Right to Repair is probably a good place to toss some money. P.P.S. To be clear I don't think we should abolish IP law entirely, just turn down the volume like 70%.

ShaneMcGowan 6y ago

They blocked pirate bay and others in ireland in 2009 and all it did was stop the less than tech savvy from accessing them, and those people weren't torrenting content anyway. This isn't going to change anything

lstamour 6y ago

It’s funny, if you had told me this was going to be introduced when DMCA was, I would have said Canadians would literally switch ISPs in order to avoid this. Now, I’m not so sure. Content blocking on YouTube and the occasional DMCA takedown notice on a Google web search tend to be the only hints you get of piracy online. Most people used to pirate all kinds of media, now we’ve Spotify and YouTube and Netflix and Disney+, etc. It’s never been easier to skip the physical disc and listen or watch media for free. That said, I could see unintended consequences. For example, this might be intended for piracy but we should keep in mind that our ISPs are often the ones owning significant media properties in Canada. Imagine Bell Canada getting the green light to block piracy services and deciding that any service which lets you watch content internationally, such as a VPN service, should be blocked in Canada and the content along with it? At what point would ISPs interpret this as a way to protect their IP-based business models? And at what point might the system open up to DMCA or YouTube style content strikes vs proper determination of copyright infringement. I’d be furious if GitHub repos started disappearing when tools, especially for education, are distinct from copyrighted materials being shared. I could even imagine a future where adblockers are considered copyright infringement because they modify the page or stream that the rights holder intended to serve. Once you allow ISPs to meddle with traffic on their own, they might not know where to stop, given a few decades.

Fogest 6y ago
This is always the main problem with these things. It sounds like a small and maybe even could be argued as a "fair" set of regulations/laws to propose, but the problem is that it opens up the box and often the line of where it stops starts to get fuzzy. Rogers and Bell are ISPs, cable/satelite providers, phone providers, control most of the major news networks (on radio and tv) as well as produce a lot of content and own streaming services. They are overall incredibly biased against illegal content online and have a huge stake in that. I don't think it makes sense for the same company who produces content and controls a lot of the media to also be the ones blocking "pirate" content. I wonder how this works with the ISP's that buy internet access wholesale from Bell and Rogers. For example my ISP is pretty small and I don't even think they forward those intimidating letters from production studios nor do I think they would care to enforce random IPs/sites to block. They are just too small of an operation to care/worry about this and wasting money on it. So will Bell and Rogers end up just blocking it on their end and not even giving these wholesale buyers a chance to manage the network? Overall I really do not trust Bell or Rogers and I do not trust them with blocking things. I really do not want to have to end up using a VPN connected to another country all the time simply to avoid blockades all over the web. Overall I feel like this just opens the box to further blocking of things not specifically piracy related. You give the government/ISP's a CM and they are going to ask for a meter later.

lwansbrough 6y ago

If you have comments for the Canadian government on this matter, an email is provided on this page: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00192.html https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00192.html Apparently your comment may be made public, FYI. I encourage everyone to make your voice heard, we’ve all had our interactions with pirated media. I learned graphic design after pirating my first copy of Photoshop, now Adobe has a customer for life. Think about how you can demonstrate the tangible (and intangible) value of piracy on the economy and society as a whole. The value is obvious for us, but clearly less obvious to lawmakers. Also worth noting that the most effective piracy measures have come from market forces: competition with the actual process of piracy. Netflix has effectively eliminated the need for movie piracy and did so simply by providing a simpler option. They use industry developed DRM. Who needs government enforcement of IP?

0-_-0 6y ago

I believe the UK tried to do the same thing, but these blocks are easily circumvented. You can just go to unblockit.club (or whatever the name is at at the time) and access many of these sites.

yummybear 6y ago

Deindexing? Oh please do - piracy will survive fine without. Even better - we’ll do it in the shadows as we previously did.

varispeed 6y ago
Remember the old days, got an FTP server IP address on IRC and it had a text file with details of more FTP servers. Then you would log in and look for stuff. I remember the excitement when you log in to incoming and there is a ton of stuff. Then you quickly have to choose what to download, as the dial-up is ticking. I wish we gone back to those times.
- imdsm 6y ago
  The discovery of the old internet, where it truly felt like websites weren't always online, where you were connecting to individual machines, and where everything felt like it was a constantly changing landscape, were the best of days.

varispeed 6y ago

Ideally all sites should be deindexed, then maybe companies like Google would cease to exist and all this tracking nonsense would end. Just daydreaming...

arghimapirate 6y ago

Don't most people who pirate these days use a VPN anyways? I don't see how this is going to do anything.

standardUser 6y ago

They'd have to block sites that tell you how to work around their efforts to block sites. And that's not going to happen anytime soon in the West. So it's essentially more theater.

newsclues 6y ago
They work with big platforms to keep the information hidden if they can’t stamp it out completely. On Reddit there was a community for cannabis delivery that is geobanned in Canada once legalization happened to crush the illicit competition.
- standardUser 6y ago
  But what's to stop someone putting up a website with instructions on accessing a Tor site or Discord server or an IRC channel?

TeeMassive 6y ago

Wasting all those resources for old industries that failed to modernize while at the same time the people named in the Panama Papers have been subject to no investigations.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

Deindexing/blocking these sites is a reasonable step. Australia did so in 2018, resulting in a 5% increase to visits to legal sites: https://www.mpa-apac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Australia-Site-Blocking-Summary-January-2020.pdf https://www.mpa-apac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Australi... It seems unreasonable to have websites openly flouting copyright law. Additionally, for software like games, the files are usually full of malware.

mantap 6y ago
What is Google if not a website that openly flouts copyright law? I don't remember Google getting license to store my website in their index or to show my images in Google Images. I don't mind, of course, but it goes to show that the whole thing is bogus and a different set of laws apply depending on how much money you have.

dang 6y ago

Discussed recently: Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821388 - April 2021 (90 comments) Actually it's rather unclear whether there's even a proposal.

butz 6y ago

Is it just me, or access to legal content is getting more complicated? How about putting all those lobbying funds for a good use and building a single platform that allows anyone to access movies, TV shows etc. for a decently priced subscription, without region blocking shenanigans?