[AusNOG] And it continues - ISP to block sites bill..

[Scott Weeks]

--- surfer at mauigateway.com wrote:
--- mkeating44 at gmail.com wrote:
From: Michael Keating <mkeating44 at gmail.com>

"The move, which has been highly effective in Britain... 
-----------------------------------------

Just for curiosity's sake I sent email to UKNOF to
ask them their opinion on it.  Won't hear anything 
for a while, though because it's the middle of the 
night there.
------------------------------------------


Some folks are up late there! :-)

scott



On 26/03/2015 23:21, Scott Weeks wrote:
> "The move, which has been highly effective in Britain..."
> 
> Is this the case there?  Hollywood can tell the gov't there to
> tell the ISPs to block web sites it doesn't like?


The courts can order *some* ISPs to block websites that
allow/facilitate infringement of copyright, or contain content that
infringes copyright, yes.

http://wiki.451unavailable.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page

Most recently:
http://torrentfreak.com/uk-blocking-more-than-100-pirate-sites-after-new
- -court-order-150324/

The Open Rights Group has done excellent work on tracking this stuff,
and provides a tool for checking per-ISP network-level censorship,
mainly targeted at 'family safe' filters but of course showing these
blocks up too: https://www.blocked.org.uk/

It isn't a global block, and AIUI the court orders are injunctions
against the ISPs rather than something targeted at the government and
then enforced by ISPs (though the precise legal process here is beyond
my knowledge), and not all of the ISPs are targeted; for instance, one
well-known site is blocked on some major ISPs /but not all/:
https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://www.thepiratebay.org

As for effectiveness - well, ask the BPI, who seem to apply for most
of these. They seem to keep doing it, but I don't know how you'd prove
that it was making any difference at all versus, for instance, the
increase in available legal options (Spotify, Amazon Prime, Google
Play, etc etc etc) when looking at the outcomes (people pirating content
).

Circumvention measures are widely available, as most of the blocking
is simple DNS stuff - changing to Google DNS (which many 'power users'
do anyway for some reason, ime) or your own resolver will 'evade' the
block on most ISPs. People who really want to get at these sites, can;
it might do /something/ to dissuade 'casual' pirates, I suppose, but
I'm not aware of any research/evidence around any of this, so wouldn't
like to say one way or the other.






























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