Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly-named “Piracy Shield”. This is Italy’s new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the copyright industry a disproportionate power to control what is available online, no court orders required. Piracy Shield went live in December, and has just issued its first …

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      Kind of, the law doesn’t actually say that it only applies to ISPs… technically speaking the Portuguese law could be applicable and enforced with a VPN provider is a court decided to do so. The legislation is kind of written in a vague way that may apply to more than just ISPs. So far they only pressured ISPs to block websites.

        • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          but the processes are so fucking long that getting something blocked takes time, our ISPs fight almost every time (…) The only actual option to get something out of the internet is to find the server and shut it down.

          Not the case at all around here (Portugal), the blocks are quick and ISPs don’t even complain, they simply comply. What the law says is that there’s a govt entity called IGAC that is allowed to ask ISPs to block a website (domain name) as long as the website is flagged as containing / hosting piracy or other form of copyright infringement. The only requirement is that IGAC has to notify the website owner asking to remove the content prior blocking. After 48 if the website is still hosting said content then IGAC will ask the ISPs to block it.

          Since this is all DNS based one can, obviously, set their DNS servers as Google or Cloudflare and bypass the block. Now the problem is that this is all fun and games until someone in the govt decides to go against Cloudflare and other DNS providers, the law would allow them to easily do it the way its written.

            • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              9 months ago

              I mean if even one of those just shuts down service in or for Portugal the entire Internet is fucked instantly.

              Yes, but what if the govt just politely tells them “look, we’ve a law about piracy and we think you should block websites at the DNS level like our ISPs are doing”. Do you think Google / Cloudflare will fight it? They already have mechanisms for that in place for parental controls etc. so… the effort of adding a block list for a country shouldn’t be a big deal.