Hollywood Tries To Take Pirate Sites Down Globally Through India Court (torrentfreak.com) 35
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The High Court in New Delhi, India, has granted another pirate site blocking order in favor of American movie industry giants, including Apple, Warner., Netflix, Disney and Crunchyroll. The injunction targets notorious pirate sites, requesting blockades at Indian ISPs. More crucially, however, globally operating domain registrars, including U.S. companies, are also compelled to take action. However, despite earlier cooperation, most don't seem eager to comply. [...] As reported by Verdictum a few days ago, the High Court in New Delhi issued a new blocking injunction on December 18, targeting more than 150 pirate site domains, including yflix.to, animesuge.bz, bs.to, and many others.
The complaint (PDF) is filed by Warner Bros., Apple, Crunchyroll, Disney, and Netflix, which are all connected to the MPA's anti-piracy arm, ACE. The referenced works include some of the most pirated titles, such as Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Silo. In addition to targeting Indian ISPs, the order also lists various domain name registries and related organizations as defendants. This includes American registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, but also the government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is linked to .to domains. By requiring domain name registrars to take action, the Indian court orders have a global impact.
In addition to suspending the domain names within three days days, the domain name registrars are given four weeks to disclose the relevant subscriber information connected to these domains. "[The registrars] shall lock and suspend Defendant Nos. 1 to 47 websites within 72 hours of being communicated with a copy of this Order and shall file all the Basic Subscriber Information, including the name, address, contact information, email addresses, bank details, IP logs, and any other relevant information [...] within four weeks of being communicated with a copy of this Order," the High Court wrote. While the "Dynamic+" injunction is designed to be a global kill switch, its effectiveness depends entirely on the cooperation of the domain name registrars. Since most of these are based outside of India, their compliance is not guaranteed.
The complaint (PDF) is filed by Warner Bros., Apple, Crunchyroll, Disney, and Netflix, which are all connected to the MPA's anti-piracy arm, ACE. The referenced works include some of the most pirated titles, such as Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Silo. In addition to targeting Indian ISPs, the order also lists various domain name registries and related organizations as defendants. This includes American registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy, but also the government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is linked to .to domains. By requiring domain name registrars to take action, the Indian court orders have a global impact.
In addition to suspending the domain names within three days days, the domain name registrars are given four weeks to disclose the relevant subscriber information connected to these domains. "[The registrars] shall lock and suspend Defendant Nos. 1 to 47 websites within 72 hours of being communicated with a copy of this Order and shall file all the Basic Subscriber Information, including the name, address, contact information, email addresses, bank details, IP logs, and any other relevant information [...] within four weeks of being communicated with a copy of this Order," the High Court wrote. While the "Dynamic+" injunction is designed to be a global kill switch, its effectiveness depends entirely on the cooperation of the domain name registrars. Since most of these are based outside of India, their compliance is not guaranteed.
The Intended side effects of Globalism (Score:3, Insightful)
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its no different than nazi germany
A planet allows North Korea to exist when East Germany died off long ago. Pretend to answer why, so I won't have to pretend a planet is full of pussies who have no grounds to stand on Godwin.
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Because China values North Korea as a buffer state between it and South Korea. And China is a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council.
East Germany unified with West Germany because of the Soviet Union's acquiescence. And the USSR, now Russia, is also a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council. All 5 veto-wielding permanent members of the UNSC must agree before any planet-scale action is taken.
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Except that in this case, the foreign court in question has sided w/ the American multinational media giants against the Indian pirate sites, so being a "global citizen" did work out for those companies
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Nice trolling.
It's about time ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... that registrars outside India's borders told those overreaching Indian courts that their power to order registrars based in other countries to do their bidding ends at India's borders - and sent Italy's courts a cc ...
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Tonga is an interesting one.
A top level country domain .to of which only a small percentage is related to Tonga or indeed hosted on the islands. Are they going to extort a Polynesian nation for the sake of a few pirates?
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No problem... (Score:2)
What "notorious" sites are they going after? (Score:2)
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AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it me or is it confusing that they are trying to nail pirate sites to the wall while AI companies are allowed to do it unchecked? I cannot count the number of ideas that I have had that I never pursued because it would have required automating something I technically wasn't allowed to automate. Now it is only legal for AI companies?
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Copying things for your own use is one kind of copyright infringement, redistributing copyrighted material is another. The former kind is harder to squeeze money out of. Whether they are technically redistributing or not is still a matter of argument.
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So, if I copy Anna's archive for my own use is OK but if I copy it to train my AI and then rent the AI to someone else is not OK. Gotcha!
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That's not even vaguely representative of what I said. I see why you're a coward.
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I personally don't find it confusing. A pirate site will let me watch a TV program or movie. An AI like ChatGPT will not not let me watch a TV or movie.
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Only because there isn't enough electricity in the world to reconstruct a video or even audio. But that doesn't make it any less relevant that it can reproduce an epub like piracy can. It's logical that audio/video will follow, if it is technically possible.
Interesting angle (Score:4, Insightful)
It is interesting to see how over the years and decades these suits n ties are extremely slowly catching on to new attacks. What used to be just DNS pseudo-blocks are now attacks directly on the registrar and forcing registration info including IP logs. And even (ab)using a very likely highly corrupt Indian court, on top of it all.
Any pirate worth their salt would have taken several measures to protect at this level anyway, and plenty of hosters and registrars are happy to shred the uselessly threatening letters for you; it is interesting to see none the less how the suits n ties grab at ever more drastic measures for their pound of perceived flesh, over the years and decades.
With streaming being the cable-insanity lacking good content it is nowadays, I predict a golden age of piracy again - mostly for shows from the golden age of TV shows and earlier.
Ohhh man (Score:2)
I am no longer going to be able to watch those top quality BollyWood blockbusters ?!?!
They did have a solution once. (Score:5, Interesting)
And it worked quite well.
Make it easier to just sign up to a streaming site to get access to the content than having to figure out how to pirate it.
I don't consume TV and movie content myself anymore. I did re-watch The IT Crowd again, but that was available for free on YouTube.
1. Not too long ago I wanted to see a new South Park episode only to find streaming it for free was blocked from my country. OK, perhaps I could find a streaming service, but none of those in my country had the latest episodes. I had HBO(MAX or whatever it was called at the time) but they did not have the rights to stream it in my country. So a VPN on my AppleTV did the trick.
2. My friend from Spain wanted us to watch some shows she had seen was on Netflix. of course those were not available here in this version of Netflix or any other service so VPN to the rescue again.
I understand why piracy are on the rise again. I am sitting here with my credit card, willing to pay to see something and i cant. So now our politicians here wanted to ban VPNs(facepalm) because people were using it to stream content on streaming services like I explained. So I wonder, if the politicians really works for the people, instead of listening to the lobbyists, why would they not ask the question. Why don't you sort your shit out so that people that are already paying for streaming and are willing to pay for it, can actually watch the content.
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If they work for the people, they shouldn't even ask the question. Just make it legal to download whatever you can't buy. Problem solved.
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Thanks for the info (Score:3)
They never learn (Score:4, Interesting)
Napster in 1999 was the opening gun. Lawsuits, DMCA in 1998, site seizures, ISP blocking, domain takedowns, arresting Kim Dotcom in 2012, Megaupload raids, Pirate Bay raids in Sweden in 2006 and again later, thousands of mirror sites, torrents, magnet links, streaming portals, cyber-lockers, now Telegram and Discord.
Every “final victory” lasted about a week.
The pattern is always the same: lawyers cut off one head, ten mirrors pop up, hosted in a new jurisdiction, using a new protocol, paid with crypto, fronted by Cloudflare, indexed by some new search engine.
Technology keeps lowering the cost of copying faster than law can raise the cost of suing.
So roughly 25–27 years of trying to “stamp out piracy”, and the total effect is not eradication but evolution.
The pirate ecosystem today is more distributed, more automated, more legally slippery than it was in 2000.
It’s a bit like trying to ban rain by suing clouds. The entertainment industry keeps swinging umbrellas and calling it enforcement, while the weather system just routes around the obstruction.
DNS is already localized (Score:2)
It looks like the Indian court order affects DNS. There is a blurb in the article about global DNS registrars being affected, with the implication that the ban extends beyond India. However, DNS is already implemented by country and region, so there's no technological reason to extend the Indian court order beyond India.
From a legal standpoint, no country wants another country to dictate what internet traffic is legal or illegal. Imagine having China, Russia, and the US issuing global takedown orders. W
But it's okay when youtube does it (Score:2)
Napster got shut down. Kim dotcom was shutdown and sued for everything he had.
But youtube has loads of copyright material. Youtube has ads, but they are easy to bypass. And, as I understand it, the content creators get little to nothing from the ad revenue.