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U.S. Anti-Piracy Symposium Emphazises Need for Site Blocking
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) held an anti-piracy symposium last week to discuss the latest achievements, challenges, and solutions in combating piracy. Experts from the public and private sectors came together to discuss various topics, including the need to deploy balanced and effective site blocking measures in the United States.
Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) organized an anti-piracy symposium where several experts discussed recent achievements, new challenges, and potential solutions.
Held at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, the meeting brought together public and private sector players to discuss various copyright and piracy-related topics.
For example, trial attorney Vasantha Rao, who works as the Department of Justice Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, discussed the Gears Reloaded case, the Z-Library takedown, plus international domain seizure actions including Operation Offsides.
Michael Christin, another trial attorney at the DoJ, went into great detail on the Jetflix case, discussing various challenges his team faced while litigating the case.
This was an openly accessible symposium, so discussion and commentary was limited to information already in the public record. That said, when discussing future anti-piracy solutions, more novel perspectives were brought up.
Piracy is ‘Maturing’
In a session on the latest trends in piracy and piracy prevention, Piracy Monitor founder Steven Hawley explained that piracy as an industry has evolved. There are many professional ‘pirate’ actors offering various services, both to consumers and aspiring site operators.
“I would say first off, the piracy in the universe has really matured, it’s metastasized, it’s a multichannel, multilevel industry, multinational phenomenon,” Hawley said.
“Market entry for a pirate is easy. If you wanted to become a pirate tomorrow, you could go online and find organizations that provide Piracy as a Service, they’ll give you content, they’ll give you a distribution platform, they’ll design your user interface, quite sophisticated.”
Marissa Bostick, Head of Global Litigation at the Motion Picture Association (MPA), also sees a combination of increased professionalism and brazenness. Interestingly, this is paired with a shift from free to paid piracy services, with Bostick mentioning ‘Magis TV‘ as one of the examples.
“Users are paying to get access to the pirated content, whether it’s IPTV, premium cyber locker accounts, illegal password services, set-top boxes, there are various forms of this. It means the pirates are actually getting direct streams of income,” Bostick said.
The fact that some pirate services don’t even try to lie low anymore is evident in examples of brazen behavior. They openly advertise themselves through billboards and register for trademarks, as Magis TV recently did.
“Piracy is really sometimes coming out of the shadows. So what we’re seeing, and we see this in Latin America, for example, billboards for piracy sites. They’re paying influencers to go on social media and promote them. They’re registering for trademarks. This is not something that’s happening on some dark web,” Bostick added.
The American ‘Site Blocking’ Dream
The speakers went into great detail on these and other challenges. This ultimately led to the question of what can be done in response. Aside from litigation, including criminal prosecutions, pirate site blocking was frequently mentioned as a solution.
MPA’s Marissa Bostick said that they have been working on this for many years and that it’s been one of the most effective anti-piracy remedies.
There are now site blocking solutions in more than 50 countries around the world, including Australia France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and South Korea.
The United States is notably absent from this list, but that may change. Bostick said that, with bipartisan and bicameral support, site blocking legislation may eventually move forward in the United States.
The call for site blocking was supported by many other speakers, including Lui Simpson of the Association of American Publishers, who stressed that the U.S. “is lagging far behind” compared to other countries, partly because the initial SOPA site blocking proposal failed in 2012.
“We’re hopeful that this time around we’ll make progress. As you know, we tried this maybe 13 years ago. The hope now is that the misinformation will not be so much of a hindrance here to actually getting a remedy in place.”
“It is long overdue. I think we’re one of the few, let’s just say more developed countries that unfortunately does not have this remedy,” Simpson added.
Attenzione!
U.S. site blocking discussions are not new and, in a meeting dedicated to anti-piracy solutions, there was little pushback. That said, it is clear that if site blocking comes to America, it should be done right.
This means that potential errors and overblocking should be ruled out, for as far as that’s possible. This is particularly important now that the Italian “Piracy Shield” site blocking scheme is cause for continued controversy.
That hasn’t gone unnoticed by the panelists at the symposium. Steven Hawley, for example, mentioned the “Piracy Shield” has had its challenges, especially because much of the process is automated without detailed verification.
“It sounds like a great system, but it needs fine-tuning. I guess this is a message to anyone who’s developing platforms like this, watch out for false positives,” Hawley said.
Lui Simpson also stressed that the U.S. should learn from site blocking schemes in other jurisdictions. However, she was not referring to overblocking, but to the tendency of blocked sites to launch alternative domains almost instantly.
If the U.S. proposes a site blocking solution, it should be dynamic, so that new domains can be added swiftly.
Bostick acknowledged this and stressed that the MPA has more than a decade of experience with site blocking measures around the globe. So, they can use everything they learned thus far to come up with a balanced and effective solution.
“We have over ten years of experience at this point with site blocking in various countries, different parts of the world, and how it can work seamlessly and effectively. So we need to use all that and use that experience to move forward,” Bostick stressed.
All in all, the USPTO’s anti-piracy symposium offered an intriguing peek into the learnings and priorities of various key players in the public and private sector. It also revealed that despite previous successes, there are still many challenges ahead.
