Canadian ISPs And Hollywood Agree On Plan To Make Themselves Website Executioner

If you take a quick look through the long history of posts we've done on the subject of site-blocking as a method for combating piracy, you'll notice that we've been fairly critical of the courts in various countries, which are issuing the blocking orders commonly. Here in America, the story is essentially the same, with only minor differences in the laws or lack of laws between each country causing barely different legal justifications for the censorship of sites that one entertainment group or another says is infringing. Too often, the courts appear to take plaintiff claims of infringement as gospel, where in some countries there is even a governmental framework that seems perfectly designed to abuse this process and have compliant courts exert as much collateral damage as possible. Our point all along is that there needs to be a refining of this process to keep the censorship out of the results and ensure that no speech that ought to be protected is caught up in the mix.

It should go without saying that the new plan being concocted by Canadian ISPs and various entertainment groups is not what we had in mind.

A coalition of movie industry companies and ISPs, including Bell, Rogers, and Cineplex are discussing a proposal to implement such measures. The Canadian blocklist would be maintained by a new non-profit organization called “Internet Piracy Review Agency” (IPRA) and enforced through the CTRC, Canadaland reports.

The new proposal is being discussed by various stakeholders including ISPs and local movie companies. As in other countries, major American movie companies are also in the loop, but they will not be listed as official applicants when the plan is submitted to the CRTC.

If something appears to be missing in all of that, it's probably because the plan doesn't make any room for anything resembling judicial oversight or the court system. Rather, this would all be implemented without any court orders or even filings from any actual copyright holder. Instead, rightsholders would inform ISPs that a site is "blatantly, overwhelmingly or structurally" built purely to engage in copyright infringement, and the ISPs would take it down. I'm sure the idea is to keep this to the most egregious of sites that are often quite bare of legitimate and protected speech, except we already know just how shitty ISPs are at being copyright cops, so it seems clear that they'll be relying almost exclusively on the word of rightsholders to implement these site-blocks.

Critics, including Michael Geist, are not pleased.

“Recent history suggests that the list will quickly grow to cover tougher judgment calls. For example, Bell has targeted TVAddons, a site that contains considerable non-infringing content,” Geist notes.

“It can be expected that many other sites disliked by rights holders or broadcasters would find their way onto the block list,” he adds.

Fortunately, all of this would have to go before the Canadian government before going into operations, and the CRTC doesn't seem to be all that enthused.

Thus far, the Government appears to be reluctant in its response. In comments to Canadaland spokesperson Karl Sasseville stressed that Canada maintains committed to an open Internet.

“Our government supports an open internet where Canadians have the ability to access the content of their choice in accordance to Canadian laws,” Sasseville says. “While other parts of the world are focused on building walls, we’re focused on opening doors‎.”

The timing of this is also quite poor, given the unfortunate conversation about net neutrality that is occurring with Canada's sub-friendly neighbors to its south. See, site-blocking has never been fully conflated with net neutrality thus far, in large part because the courts have been an admittedly imperfect check on telecom industry power abuse. But in this plan there is no court to provide that check, only a loose government agency oversight twice separated from the ISPs actions by a newly crafted non-profit.

Meanwhile, of course, the very attempt to skirt any representatives of the democratic government and its court system is about as against the public interest as it gets, as Geist points out.

“The government rightly seems dismissive of the proposal in the Canadaland report but as leading Internet providers, Bell and Rogers should be ashamed for leading the charge on such a dangerous, anti-speech and anti-consumer proposal,” Geist concludes.

Here, here.