Last December the Court of Milan ordered Cloudflare to block sites added to Italy’s Piracy Shield system. Cloudflare sees itself as a neutral intermediary but increasingly frustrated rightsholders say it should play a more active role by assisting their fight against piracy. A decision issued by the same court now requires Google to poison its Public DNS to prevent access to pirate sites. It was handed down on March 11 without Google being heard in the matter.
[…]
In a lawsuit filed at the Court of Milan, Serie A complained that Google refused to comply with requests to block pirate sites for which AGCOM had issued blocking instructions.
This is the 3rd or 4th example I have seen of court ordered DNS poisoning in Italy. I do wonder as this type of copyright legislation becomes more popular worldwide if it will start to affect PGs DNS reccomendations. Especially if it starts to affect VPNs and their DNS as well, such as the actions AirVPN had to take.
Currently I don’t think there is anything in the criteria preventing a DNS resolver with forced poisoning, such as Quad9, from being reccomended. I am not even sure if that would be the appropriate route to go.
I tend to believe, as the case with most things, its about the money. The “Piracy Shield” system was launched in February 2024 and in 2023…
Some 39 per cent of Italian adults engaged in piracy in 2023, down from 42 per cent in 2022.
This piracy is estimated to have cost the Italian economy €2 billion in revenue, resulting in a €821 million loss to GDP and the loss of approximately 11,200 jobs.
Considering something similar has happened with Quad9, I’m genuinely frustrated that they just aren’t going to the individuas first who is “Pirating” and instead order the DNS providers is crazy.
Like are ISPs in Italy not logging the websites people go through at their IP or what? More than anything it’s as always just excessive.
I am not sure a policy of going after any individual who may have visited an offending website is a better policy. This sounds like an extremly slippery slope. Especially considering how ham-handed they are about what they consider offending sites.
there’s no in between though
it’s either
Poisoning the DNS which sets unprecedented standards here.
Go after the violating sites itself, It has happened and It has affected me quite a bit.
or
Go after the violators.
Not to mention the problem of what they would consider the illegal, if Governments can control any site, any DNS this sets unprecedented, it’s best to do the last one since this means that at least they’re not controlling the DNS or Taking down sites.
There’s no middle ground or balance to choose, it’s one or another.
I don’t see any of those options as being an effective way to deal with piracy. DNS resolvers and websites can be easily changed to avoid these issues. Going after individuals would not only be a massive under taking (see 39% of italian adults enagaged in piracy in 2023) but it would be extremely hard to prove wrongdoing in most cases, and the actual offense would not be worth the resources.
The best way to deal with piracy is to offer alternative legal services that are affordable and easy to use.
This is true
Fun Fact, I wanted to propose the EU a law about handling ownership of goods being purchased digitally without encouraging the use of piracy in hopes that this will fully solve it and illegalizing exclusivity.
but I never got back to it a year later unfortunately.
just lobbying by football clubs (an Italian senator is also the owner of a football team, just to be clear…).
In Italy, piracy in general isn’t really prosecuted. I know a ton of people who still pirate via Torrent without a VPN and nobody has ever said anything.
The problem is really football, streaming football, and selling illegal streams (also called “pezzotto” in Italian) on Telegram and other similar channels. Basically, a lot of people, to avoid paying for DAZN and SKY, illegally buy IPTV devices that allow low-cost pirate streaming to watch the games.
