ISPs ‘Betrayed’ Over Pirate Site-Blocking Threats, The Reckoning Will Be Invisible
Italian ISPs are required to work with AGCOM and rightsholders to ensure the Piracy Shield blocking system operates as intended. It's a burden that only benefits rightsholders, but the ISPs are expected to cover their own costs. That contribution was insulted this week by a legal amendment that threatens ISPs with prison for failing to report piracy to the authorities. Google describes it as a requirement to flood the judiciary to avoid prison. ISPs speak of betrayal; it doesn't get any worse than that.
Fresh amendments to Italian law were passed by Senators this week and their effects will soon be felt on the IPTV piracy battlefield.
Covered in detail in our earlier report, this advanced legal weaponry is incapable of dealing with distant pirate IPTV services. Instead, it mainly targets communications infrastructure, much of it operated by rightsholders’ supposed allies – ISPs – who were given no say in the matter.
VPN and DNS services anywhere on planet earth will be required to join Piracy Shield and start blocking pirate sites, most likely at their own expense, just like Italian ISPs are required to do already. And remember the uproar when Cloudflare was wrongfully blocked in a case of shared IP address collateral damage? Well, a preventative fix arrived this week thanks to a clever amendment.
