Netflix is piling on with other TV and movie producing and distributing global giants to try to get more “pirate” websites blocked in Australia.
The way these copyright holders are going about this demand, filed before the country’s Federal Court, is telling: they want Internet Service Providers (ISP) to do the blocking.
And Netflix, Village Roadshow, Disney and Universal among others, are knocking on the right door: during the March mass-shooting in New Zealand, ISPs in Australia controversially sprang to action to block whole websites in a bid to prevent footage of the crime being viewed online.
Therefore it isn’t just about ISPs power to control the internet, but also their willingness to do that. One could call it a far cry from simply being “service providers.”
Now big entertainment industry players want to use ISPs to get rid of a number of torrenting and streaming sites accused of piracy, listing both the accusers and the accused in its report:
Here are all of the URLs and sites that are requested to be blocked.
In Australia, this type of website blocking has been made legal in 2015 when the country amended its copyright law.
The bill allowed TV and film industry to seek injunctions from courts, that would result in ISPs disabling access to websites hosted in other countries.
This is not the first time that pirate websites have been the subject of such action since the legislation was passed. This time, the list is 86 targets and 37 domain names long, the report continued.
The application submitted to the Australian Federal Court accuses these sites of copyright infringement or facilitation of the activity as their primary purpose – and notes that this is done “sometimes for money, sometimes for free.”
The ISPs – among them Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone – are expected to carry out the task – that is, should the court grant the request. This will be done via DNS or IP address blocking, “or any other means agreed with the rights holder.”
This news out of Australia is more proof that ISPs are increasingly being used as tools of censorship. But they are also these days frequently in the spotlight for monetizing user data; because, forget about Facebook and Google – it’s your ISP that knows you best.
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