At the start of this decade, US lawmakers drafted several controversial bills to make it easier for copyright holders to enforce their rights online.

These proposals, including SOPA and PIPA, were met with fierce resistance from the public as well as major technology companies. They feared that the plans, which included pirate site-blocking measures, went too far.

The public protests columnated in a massive Internet blackout. This had the desired effect, as the bills were eventually shelved early 2012.

In the many years that followed, the “site blocking” issue was avoided like the plague. The aversion was mostly limited to the US, as website blocking became more and more common abroad, where it’s one of the entertainment industries’ preferred anti-piracy tools.

Emboldened by these foreign successes, it appears that rightsholders in the US are now confident enough to bring the subject up again, albeit very gently.

Most recently the site-blocking option was mentioned in a joint letter from the RIAA and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), which contained recommendations to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) Vishal Amin.

The IPEC requested input from the public on the new version of its Joint Strategic Plan for Intellectual Property Enforcement. According to the music industry groups, website blocking should be reconsidered an anti-piracy tool.

“There are several changes that should be made legislatively to help legal authorities and third parties better protect intellectual property rights,” the music groups write.

“These include fixing the DMCA, making it a felony to knowingly engage in unauthorized streaming of copyrighted works, and investigating the positive impact that website blocking of foreign sites has in other jurisdictions and whether U.S. law should be revised accordingly.”

The RIAA and NMPA choose their words carefully, realizing that it’s a sensitive issue. In a single sentence, however, they hint at bringing back SOPA-like blocking powers, including criminalizing online streaming.

A lot has changed in recent years though. The music groups point out that site-blocking has proven to be an effective enforcement tool abroad which has helped to decrease piracy and boost legal consumption.

According to the music industry groups, there is a pressing need for additional tools to stop pirate sites which increasingly use foreign domain names and bulletproof hosting. Blocking could be the right answer.

As such, now could be a good time to put the issue on the political agenda again.

“As website blocking has had a positive impact in other countries without significant unintended consequences, the U.S. should reconsider adding this to its anti-piracy tool box,” the RIAA and NMPA write.

From the RIAA/NMPA submission

The RIAA and NMPA are not the only ones to hint at these measures. The Copyright Alliance, which describes itself as the “unified voice of the copyright community,” also references site-blocking. Again, very subtly.

The group notes that IPEC may want to “observe how other countries are enforcing copyright laws, and whether those enforcement efforts are effective.”

There’s only one suggestion that’s specifically mentioned in this regard, and that’s site-blocking. The Copyright Alliance points out that this has been rather effective abroad and that the US could learn from these efforts.

“In addition to learning what remedies are effective, much can be learned from other countries in ensuring such remedies are proportionate and do not result in overblocking or other unwanted consequences,” they write.

The submissions suggest that after seven years copyright holders are gearing up to call for US blocking proposals again.

While these will undoubtedly be met with protests, a full comeback is inevitable. In recent years US rightsholders have lobbied and litigated for site blocking measures in dozens of countries, while the issue was left untouched on their home soil.

This is now starting to change, very slowly.

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Here are the above -referenced copies of the RIAA/NMPA (pdf) and Copyright Alliance (pdf) submissions to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, which both cover a wide range of topics.

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Section 115a of Australia’s Copyright Act allows copyright holders to apply for injunctions to force ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing ‘pirate’ sites.

The legislation has been used on many occasions since its introduction in 2015 but copyright holders say the law needs to be tightened to prevent circumvention. Those concerns spawned the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2018, which contains proposals to close the loopholes.

One of the key aims is to restrict access to proxy and mirror sites that appear after an injunction has been granted. However, the amendments lay out the ability to do that without court intervention, something that’s making activists and academics nervous.

Another is to expand grounds for an injunction. Currently “online locations” outside Australia with a “primary purpose of infringing” are targets for blocking. The amendments would see sites that have “the primary effect” of infringing or facilitating infringement also being sucked in, opening the door for blocking general purpose file-hosting sites.

Finally, search engines are seen as useful indexes for people looking for information to access sites that have already been blocked. The amendments forsee platforms like Google purging their search results of references to blocked sites.

Yesterday, the Senate’s Environment and Communications Legislation Committee published the results of its inquiry. Those hoping for an additional dissenting voice will be disappointed.

“The committee is of the view that the amendments proposed by the bill are likely to improve the operation of the injunctive scheme in section 115A of the Copyright Act, and represent a measured and proportionate response to concerns identified by stakeholders in relation to the operation of that scheme,” the report reads.

“In this respect, the committee also notes that the majority of submissions received by the committee supported the bill and recommended that it be passed unamended.”

Quantifying its decision, the Committee acknowledges concerns that “adaptive injunctions” (which allow for post-injunction proxy and mirror sites to be blocked) will be left up to copyright holders and ISPs to decide, so without intervention from the Court they could be open to abuse. However, it believes that enough safeguards are in place to ensure that does not happen.

“[T]he committee is of the view that the measures are appropriately circumscribed. In particular, the committee notes the evidence that the Court would maintain ultimate oversight over these injunctions, as well as the evidence that there must a sufficient nexus between the online location covered by the original injunction and the location to which the order is expanded,” the report reads.

Tackling the complex “primary effect” amendment, the Committee notes that it has its critics and could, in theory, encompass legitimate platforms. However, it says that there are “adequate safeguards” already present in Section 115A of the Copyright Act so “this would not occur in practice.”

Finally, on forcing search engines to purge their results of previously-blocked sites, the Committee again acknowledges objections from those who feel such measures are unnecessary. Again, however, the report dismisses the concerns, noting that search engines may play a role in both infringement and enforcement of copyright so the measures are “appropriate.”

It also notes that a voluntary arrangement between copyright holders and search engine providers may yet be reached, so if all else fails the proposed amendment will provide an “important backstop” in the event such agreements prove ineffective.

Summing up, the Committee offers the suggestion that the new amendments should be subject to a review two years after being put in place, a period that should allow enough time to assess whether any components need to be “clarified, rationalised or improved”

“The committee considers that, on balance, the benefits of the bill outweigh any potential negative impacts that could arise from the proposed amendments. The committee therefore recommends that the bill should be passed,” the report concludes.

The full report can be downloaded here (pdf)

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Stream-ripping tools and services have been around for many years and are currently most closely associated with obtaining tracks from YouTube, Spotify, and Deezer.

However, before these undoubtedly more efficient tools came along, users with an aversion to peer-to-peer networks often used software to ‘record’ songs from streaming Internet radio stations.

While more cumbersome than straightforward downloading, there are virtually no risks attached to doing so, with many considering this ‘private copying’ and therefore completely legal.

Somewhere in the middle sit services like MusicMonster.fm, a Germany-based service that claims to make stream-ripping easy, by scanning Internet radio streams for the user, ripping out songs, and then making these available to the end user for download.

“First, you should put together a wish list – just click the button ‘I want!’ next to your favorite songs,” MusicMonster’s site reads.

“If one of these songs is played in one of the web radios monitored by MusicMonster.FM, the song will be recorded automatically and digitally and will be recorded on [the site’s storage space].”

From here (or from Dropbox if the option is selected), songs can be downloaded to the user’s computer in MP3 format. This, the site suggests, isn’t a problem because users have already paid for the right when the stations paid their licensing fees.

“The ability to save music (eg: analog recording) is a paid right. The customer has already paid for it,” MusicMonster advises.

“If you have not noticed this in recent years, then the music industry has received payments without providing anything in return. Now this consideration will be used by you. The MP3 music file you have recorded and created is not a copy of the original piece of music, but an independent legal object.”

Perhaps needless to say, record labels aren’t impressed with this type of product and MusicMonster.fm eventually came to the attention of Sony Music’s lawyers.

In September 2017, the Munich Regional Court delivered a first instance judgment that MusicMonster itself is the creator of the copies, not the user, so in this case the act of stream-ripping represents a violation of the label’s reproduction rights.

Following an appeal by the service, on November 22, 2018 the Higher Regional Court of Munich agreed that the operators of the site could not rely on the private copying exception, declaring the MusicMonster platform both unlicensed and unlawful.

The Federal Music Industry Association (Bundesverband Musikindustrie (BVMI)) welcomed the ruling.

“This is a very important decision that contributes further clarification,” says BVMI Managing Director Dr. Florian Drücke, who describes MusicMonster as a service trying to generate profit using the private copying exception.

“The industry will continue to be consistent against such brazen business models that unfairly interfere with the legal digital market, mislead consumers, and disregard the rights of artists and their partners.”

René Houareau, Legal & Politics Director at BVMI, adds that courts are increasingly able to identify illegal and opportunistic business models from those that are officially licensed and return revenue to the entertainment industries.

BVMI adds that stream-ripping is a big problem for the music industry worldwide but acknowledges that in some instances in Germany, the use of stream-ripped music sits in a legal gray area.

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This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

The Nun is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	The Nun	5.5 / trailer
2	(1)	Mission: Impossible – Fallout	8.0 / trailer
3	(…)	Peppermint	6.5 / trailer
4	(5)	A Star is Born	8.2 / trailer
5	(2)	The Meg	5.9 / trailer
6	(3)	The Equalizer 2	6.9 / trailer
7	(6)	Mile 22	6.1 / trailer
8	(4)	Incredibles 2	8.0 / trailer
9	(10)	Crazy Rich Asians	7.2 / trailer
10	(…)	First Man	7.7 / trailer

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Three years ago Australia amended its copyright law to pave the way for pirate site blocking injunctions.

Section 115a of Australia’s Copyright Act allows rightsholders to request ISP blockades of infringing sites in local courts and has been actively used since.

While the entertainment industries have signaled that the legislation is effective, they also see room for improvement. The Australian Government appears to agree, as it has tabled a series of amendments that will strengthen the blocking capabilities.

Among other things, the new plans will allow copyright holders to apply for injunctions that will not only target infringing ‘online locations’ but also their appearances in searches. This means that Google and other search engines can be required to remove entire domains from their search results.

This plan is backed by many entertainment industry companies, including the very vocal Village Roadshow.

Google, meanwhile, has asked the Government to slow down, describing an expansion at this time as premature. Similarly, the Digital Industry Group, representing Facebook, Google, and Twitter, cautioned against the expansions as well.

Aside from directly affected stakeholders, other interested parties have also chimed in. This includes Matthew Rimmer, Professor in Intellectual Property and Innovation Law at the Faculty of Law, at the Queensland University of Technology.

In his submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications last week, Rimmer heavily criticizes the existing site blocking efforts as well as the planned expansions.

The professor notes that Australia’s copyright regime is closely tied to the US copyright system, where similar site-blocking efforts were previously rejected.

“Given the United States Congress rejected the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) site-blocking legislation, the Australian Parliament should similarly reject the crude policy option of site-blocking,” Rimmer’s first recommendation reads.

According to the professor, there’s not enough evidence to indicate that the current blocking measures have been effective. The evidence that’s available comes from the entertainment industry, which seems to be a weak foundation for new copyright laws, he says.

Instead of expanding current site-blocking laws, Rimmer recommends repealing the original blocking measures instead.

“Given that the legislation has failed to fulfill its original aims and objectives, the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015 (Cth) should be repealed, rather than expanded.”

The professor notes that the new plans to add search engines is “far too broad and wide in its intent and its impact.” This makes it open to abuse by copyright holders.

The blocking efforts could restrict access to public domain works, for example, and Rimmer stresses that respect for freedom of speech and freedom of expression is inadequate.

“The further expansion of site-blocking by the Australian Parliament will have larger implications for freedom of speech and expression in the digital age,” Rimmer cautions.

Instead of increasing the enforcement options for media companies, the professor calls on the Government to work on a “bill of rights” to protect the freedoms of Australian citizens instead.

“Australia does need a bill of rights to better protect the freedoms of Australian citizens. This is particularly important in the context of regulation of the Internet, search engines, and cloud computing,” Rimmer notes in his final recommendation.

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A copy of Rimmer’s full submission can be found here (pdf).

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