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Democrats Government The Internet Censorship

Democrat Teams Up With Movie Industry To Propose Website-Blocking Law (arstechnica.com) 132

Posted by BeauHD from the site-blocking dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites. Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill. [...]

Lofgren's bill (PDF) would impose site-blocking requirements on broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million. The bill has exemptions for VPN services and "similar services that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers"; DNS providers that offer service "exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols"; and operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities. Lofgren released a summary of the bill explaining how copyright owners can obtain blocking orders. "A copyright owner or exclusive licensee may file a petition in US District Court to obtain a preliminary order against a foreign website or online service engaging in copyright infringement," the summary said.

For non-live content, the petition must show that "transmission of a work through a foreign website likely infringes exclusive rights under Section 106 [of US law] and is causing irreparable harm." For live events, a petition must show that "an imminent or ongoing unauthorized transmission of a live event is likely to infringe, and will cause irreparable harm." The proposed law says that after a preliminary order is issued, copyright owners would be able to obtain orders directing service providers "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order." Judges would not be permitted to "prescribe any specific technical measures" for blocking and may not require any action that would prevent Internet users from using virtual private networks.Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge described the bill as a "censorious site-blocking" measure "that turns broadband providers into copyright police at Americans' expense."

"Rather than attacking the problem at its source -- bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court -- Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry has decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship," Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. "Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites accused of copyright infringement. More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers results in global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on one individual's filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we've seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries."

Democrat Teams Up With Movie Industry To Propose Website-Blocking Law More | Reply

Democrat Teams Up With Movie Industry To Propose Website-Blocking Law

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  • Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @10:34PM (#65129691)

    Build out the infrastructure to let the executive block whatever offends them. There's no way this system gets implemented without it growing beyond its original (stated) purpose.

    Why don't they just order a copy of the Great Firewall of China from the source?

    • Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @10:47PM (#65129721)

      Growing beyond its original purpose is the point here.

      Currently most of the world, where the legal abuse called "copyright" hasn't yet reached the levels brought about by MAFIAA and her Japanese and EU equivalents, tends to block access from foreign jurisdictions anyway, so double-blocking it will not make a whole lot of difference.

      What's important for MAFIAA is to have a handy law, which allows them to use threat of a powerful government action on foreign governments. Eventually the hand develops a life on its own, and is used for anything.

      See, for example, the many years of creative bullying of US competitors by the US Trade representative.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

        No different from the Berne convention itself, really. We never should have ratified that crap, we stayed out of it for over 100 years and fucking Hollywood was doing just fine without it. But no, those assholes are always wanting to be more like Europe, and the worst ones like Johnny Depp talk about how great it is even though he couldn't stand living there.

      • Currently people are getting around those with these using VPNs. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that they will go after VPNs next.

        As far as that infrastructure it's more or less already there seeing as how there's only a handful of ISPs.

        On the other hand it's actually a blessing that a Democrat is pushing this since there's no way in hell to Republicans will let it through now. They've been blocking everything for 35 years now and old habits are hard to break.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Moryath ( 553296 )
          Note the age. Lofgren should have been barred from office for senility some time ago. Much like 90% of the sitting Republicans. She has no idea what her bill is actually doing.

        • What "porn blocks"? Is that something from flyover US?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Rujiel ( 1632063 )

            Age verification requirements are moving ahead in states like Tennessee, which is an invitation for digital identity
            https://apnews.com/article/ten... [apnews.com]

            • Digital identity is nice to have, it would be hard for the new American government to find the traitors and the illegals without it.

              They already have it good in China, and are starting various test rollouts in Russia, I'm sure trump would not want a digital identity gap.

          • What "porn blocks"? Is that something from flyover US?

            Florida has it, you might've heard of that state. It's not really a block so much as it is having to verify your age through some sketchy sites. It also accomplishes very little to stop "kids" (more realistically, teenagers) from seeing porn.

        • On the other hand it's actually a blessing that a Democrat is pushing this since there's no way in hell to Republicans will let it through now.

          The TikTok ban has entered the chat.

          Okay, granted, that passed with bipartisan support as a rider to a foreign aid spending bill, but there it is.

          • In the case of TikTok, the Republicans wanted it gone first, Trump in particular, because a bunch of people used it to conspire ordering tickets to one of his rallies for the purpose of not showing up, which created a ton of empty seats. The Dems joined the Republicans later in this nonsense.

            In this case, the Dems are proposing this law, so the Republicans may not back it. However, given that it can be used as a slippery slope to give more censorship power to Dear Leader, they may break from tradition

        • Currently people are getting around those with these using VPNs. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that they will go after VPNs next.

          I highly doubt that. The entire reason for porn blocks was to prevent minors from accessing that content. Free VPNs might be targeted, but paid VPN services help mitigate the child concern by way of a credit/debit card involved to pay for it.

          And VPNs have far more legitimate uses in protecting private data and remote connectivity. Going after those is a bit like going after guns. Good luck, since there’s more than one painfully obvious valid use argument.

          On the other hand it's actually a blessing that a Democrat is pushing this..

          Not really. Tells me that a single countri

        • For every new restriction there's going to be a new set of circumventions.

    • Re:Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Thursday January 30, 2025 @01:43AM (#65129861)

      The 'hosts' file says hi.

      Let's be real, the point of DNS was to not have this happen, but we let companies and people treat DNS as property, and the we see bad guys hiding behind cloudflare, and DNS registrar's having "privacy" guards to keep them from being sued or murdered.

      What's likely going to happen in the long run is that we'll see an abandonment of the DNS system entirely, and a distributed trusted domain mapping (think bit-torrent) grows out of this, so as more people visit "trusted sites", the value of "registering a domain with a registrar" sinks, because people won't trust domains attributed to malware, ads, or illegal services. However this means that piracy sites will likely be trusted more than legitimate sites.

      If you want to see evidence of how things are breaking, there are programs that chrome and microsoft won't let you download because people don't download this file very often. From Github. More to the point there are programs that are claimed as malware, which aren't. So how are you supposed to trust the AV product when it routinely flags software built with specific tools that script kiddies like to also use results in everything built with those tools to become flagged as malware.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        DNS privacy is required in the EU due to GDPR rules. You can request the data if you have a legitimate reason to get it, and if you live in a GDPR country where you are subject to the same laws.

        That's how it should be. Private people registering domains should not have to dox themselves.

      • Abandoning DNS as we know it is beyond unlikely. About as likely as we would abandon plumbing to bring water into your home. DNS is arguably the most essential protocol to the functioning of the internet. It can't be changed very much because it is infrastructure .. like plumbing.

        Secondly , powers that be will never do it because its ubiquity and extremely insecure design has become a useful and profitable surveillance vector. Literally everything you do on the internet, every address you visit, has to be r

    • Build out the infrastructure to let the executive block whatever offends them. There's no way this system gets implemented without it growing beyond its original (stated) purpose.

      Why don't they just order a copy of the Great Firewall of China from the source?

      My very first thought was that this is another form of the DMCA, which is used to block indie artists constantly on youtube and the like. They just want more reach/overreach to block content that they aren't making money on themselves. This would change from "foreign sites" to "anything we don't like" about two seconds after implementation.

    • Because the Chinese didn't open source it ?

    • And it will still be built so incompetently that anyone using a VPN or Tor will still bypass it with zero issues.

      A California representative is pandering to California media industry. In other news, water is still quite wet.

  • the 1st will put an stop to this!

  • copyright the letter E and then you can shutdown any web site that does not pay your fee!

  • First of all, who really uses their ISP's DNS servers at this point? Second, just use a VPN, which from summary this law apparently exempts anyway. Third, use Tor. Fourth, yeah, they might as well enact The Great Firewall of America while they're at it. Why do I sense that many of the shady VPN services out there are the ones behind this?

    Good grief.

    • Re:Oh joy. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BlacKSacrificE ( 1089327 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @10:54PM (#65129735)

      > who really uses their ISP's DNS servers at this point?

      90% of the population. Remember, you're on a tech site. Most people would be phones out, opening instagram from sheer boredom before you even finished the sentence "..numbers to a human friendly and readable format". This is why the internet is the cluster fuck that it is. Those who know are an unprofitable minority, their voices easily drowned out by the majority who will not only pay for shit on a plate and say "thank you", but they'll call you a paranoid freak for daring to suggest privacy, opsec and freedom of information are things worth fighting for.

      • Re:Oh joy. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Random361 ( 6742804 ) on Thursday January 30, 2025 @12:07AM (#65129809)

        Of course you have a point. Just in the last few years I've been in situations where I've had IT guys and midlevel managers freak out because I obviously knew more about security than they did. One idiot found out that I was using Autodesk Fusion 360 on my laptop and assumed that I pirated it. (No, I have a legitimate research license from Autodesk.) Someone found out I had a Ham radio license and spread the rumor that I must be one of those survivalist "sovereign citizen" whacks. (I don't get it either.) Before that at a different place, some other idiot saw that I ran a VPN when using their public network on my equipment and made some crack about it.

        The best one, though, was when a company ran some mandatory IT security lecture for the entire company and used some video interview that was done at DEFCON in the social engineering village a few years prior. We're all watching this and I'm shaking my head at the inanity of it. Then in the background everyone sees me walk by nonchalantly in a convention T-shirt. Everyone broke up laughing. I still quite that pathetic fucking place.

        In today's America, regardless of whatever political side from which you hail, you're demonized if you're not an idiot who doesn't know how anything works. If you know basic chemistry you're conflated to be a meth cook. If you know how computer networking works, you must be some evil hacker. As a professional in many careers, you have to continually correct people who failed sixth grade biology and get all their information from Google AI. It doesn't help that shit shows like Hollywood go in and spread fear by making it look like we're literal gods, so they stoke fear; sorry, we're not all illegally hacked into every government database under the sun and can run your fingerprints, phone records, background check, and find out what you had for dinner last night in three minutes.

        Some law like this might actually have some effect, I guess. But what is more likely to happen if such a law were to pass is that all these VPN vultures like NordVPN will intensify their advertising and make out like bandits. Hell, in some places if you know what Tor is you're assumed to be some "dark web black hat criminal."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cstacy ( 534252 )

        > who really uses their ISP's DNS servers at this point?

        90% of the population.

        VPNs are no longer nerd technology. Pretty much the same people who use any anti-virus, are the same people who use VPNs. The consumer does not know how a VPN works except that it involves "encryption" and that VPN services totally keep your computer safe, and includes and subsumes content filtering and anti-virus. You should always use a VPN in the coffee shop or airport or when traveling, and the benefit is that you can access region-restricted content. Everyone knows this. Not just nerds. It is totally m

  • Killing the cow (Score:3)

    by Unpopular Opinions ( 6836218 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @10:41PM (#65129703)

    To get rid of a handful of ticks. Expected for a politician.

  • Democrats TRUMP IS FASCIST!!... but first.... (Score:3)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @10:43PM (#65129707)

    Hold up. Hold up. We're going to get to the fascist stuff. But we have a few items to knock off our list first.

    • Yeah when you're the only alleged opposition to corporate takeover of the entire government it's kind of tone-deaf to play your cards on protecting their IP

  • Lawyers take the site down with a lie. And the site owners have to jump through hoops to prove they are innocent. And the scum sucking lawyers move on to the new innocent victims. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat!

    • Lawyers take the site down with a lie. And the site owners have to jump through hoops to prove they are innocent. And the scum sucking lawyers move on to the new innocent victims. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat!

      That's exactly the point. Take down indie content and hope they don't have the resources to fight back. I've known a few bands that have given up putting music online due to that sort of harassment. And once you give up putting music online, you've given up all but local shows and handing out CDs or thumbdrives of your music.

  • Everyone and their mother knows how to pirate in multiple ways. This might have worked back in 1999 when the internet was young

    • Re:way too little, way too late (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Uldis Segliņš ( 4468089 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @10:51PM (#65129731)
      Would not work in 1999 nor will in 2025. Stupid both as idea and technology wise. And is not necessary, even for film industry themselves. But democracy it erodes, as it is a tool, that will tempt to do unrelated restrictions.

    • Everyone and their mother knows how to pirate in multiple ways. This might have worked back in 1999 when the internet was young

      Everyone and their mother is waiting for the pirate app to show up in the store, and would be left drooling in a corner if you forced them to install something with setup.exe manually.

      Don’t assume this generation has motivation beyond TikTok addiction. Their definition of “pirate” is not paying for Netflix by “hacking” an account via text message to someone who can afford it.

  • Copyright is dead (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Do you or they think that non-Western AIs will NOT be trained using copyrighted material?

  • riiiiiight (Score:3)

    by Slashythenkilly ( 7027842 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @11:28PM (#65129759)
    " a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites" Tell me you dont understand the internet without telling me you dont understand the internet.
  • Now we see why what pro Democrat actors/studios get in return for their bribes/campaign contributions, this is a way to pay them back for their support. I love our democracy in action.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Why not cash in at this point? May as well do the paymasters bidding. Especially since it's likely to go absolutely no where: the (R)s are long since past doing Hollywood any favors. Now Lofgren can get a Hollywood financed 400K/y no-show non-profit chairmanship job for one of his idiot kids.

  • Hollywood has been burned to ashes.

  • I suppose they'll copyright my hosts file next?

  • A whole years work... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Thursday January 30, 2025 @12:30AM (#65129829)

    Lets assume Pluto is running a pirate streaming service.

    In response Micky Mouse files a legal petition against Pluto's domain name. If the mouse succeeds his legal petition has to be served to every single ISP or DNS provider that would separately implement the block. He would have to pay each ISP or DNS provider fees to implement that block.

    Pluto respond by using a public redirect / proxy service. Micky Mouse is now fucked because Micky can't demand that service be blocked as this would "interfere with user access to non-infringing material on another website or online service;". Pluto can change the redirect faster than Micky can file amendments with changes to URLs and pay all the ISPs to implement them.

    What if Micky files a legal petition against Pluto's IP? If successful petition has to include and be served to every single ISP that is to block Pluto's IP. Pluto responds by periodically pulling new IPs from his upstream faster than Micky can file amendments with endless changes to IPs.

    I think the key to this is "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order" coupled with NOT allowing court to "prescribe any specific technical measures to be used or other actions to be taken by a service provider to comply with such order; or". This is the key to this whole scheme. Why would the legislation seek to explicitly deny a court the possibility of determining what steps are reasonable up front?

    I think the answer to that is they want the technical requirements for compliance to be open ended with the goal of being able to demand "reasonable" from ISPs.

    Does reasonable mean ISPs writing custom programs to monitor Pluto's redirect URL and automatically update ACLs or DNS whenever the address changes? When Pluto gets wise to that and implements countermeasures to break the ISPs custom program is it reasonable to expect them to fix it? Does reasonable include installing some kind of third party blocking system that dynamically pulls identifiers from a central provider? Does it even matter what reasonable is given lawyers cost a fortune to figure that out? What Micky et el really seem to want is standing to force ISPs to do whatever they want.

    Otherwise this legislation is utterly pointless and unworkable because circumvention is absolutely trivial.

  • Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries"

    All of which are about to vanish in a puff of LLM smoke.....

    operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities.

    Deeply disturbing stance and also an attempt to remove the shared IP defence

  • ... disrupt traffic ...accused of ...

    No evidence and no responsibility: We've seen the US do this before.

    " ... likely infringes ... causing irreparable harm."

    We've seen what "likely" means in the DMCA, and the corporate response will be the same, allowing Hollywood to block thousands of ... not accounts this time but web-servers. Actually, preventing the USA talking to the rest of world, might be a good thing.

    Since download-ers aren't really customers, the "harm" isn't real either.

    ... applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers ...

    There's the real plan, 'disappear' an address from the US TLD, then every DNS server in the world will do the sa

  • Twenty years after the death of author and legally defined other is fair - gives the sprogs time to grow up.

    Owned by a corporation? Twenty years in total...

    Seems fair ;)

  • ... push us to update to a distributed crypto-based DNS?

    If so, I don't mind. It might actually be useful.

  • "...broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million..."

    By the time this is enacted, if it ever is, we'll see umbrella organizations comprised of dozens of "independent" companies with 99,999 subscribers and annual revenue three cents less than $100 million.

  • So if someone puts a pirated movie on Google Docs, will the judges block Google Docs for everyone?

  • The notorious van der Leyen had a similarly brilliant idea when she was a gov official in Germany, more than ten years ago. Luckily it was shot down for the BS it really was but it did not seem to hurt her rocket-like career.

    Shocking to see such stupid ideas coming back in US politics.

  • They use their charity status to get away with a lot of piracy. Be honest here, you know they host old movies still under copyright and game roms, they will be shut down under this law.

  • If there is a site out there hosting unauthorized copies of copyrighted works, instead of pushing for site blocking to get the stuff blocked (as has happened in Australia and elsewhere and is being proposed by this new law in the USA) why aren't the copyright holders going after the original hosts to get the content taken down completely?

    Surely, a complete takedown of the content is a much better outcome than all this site blocking BS...

  • We already use VPNs when doing that, don't waste your time.

  • So we make machine guns illegal.

    But instead of arresting the owners of machine guns, or the sellers of machine guns, we make van drivers responsible for checking if they have any machine guns in their packages.

    Seems reasonable.
  • I don't want/need a nanny curtailing my rights of freedom of expression rights to view what I want on the internet. Had enough of what Democrats have done for the last 4 years ! Sound pretty good, didn't it !

  • First, . . . (Score:3)

    by hduff ( 570443 ) <`hoytduff' `at' `gmail.com'> on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:47AM (#65130005) Homepage Journal

    First, they came for the pirate sites . . .

  • The Pirate Bay is still accessible. Despite all the blocking across the world it is still functional. There's no way to resolve the technicalities of the internet with legislation.

    • Hollywood wants SOMETHING DONE. The recipients of its largese will do what it wants, even if it achieves nothing. Everybody has achieved something; the donors have got their Act, the politicians have got their money. So let's not tell them it's pointless - they might try harder and do something really destructive.

  • The only good point regarding this government effort to install more infrastructure to censor is that it doesn't mention protecting children or catching terrorists.

  • Okay. (Score:2)

    by Z80a ( 971949 )

    But bring copyright back to 14 years and make a crime to try to erase media from existence.

  • This is why Trump is in office... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Dems need to be focusing on stuff the American people want, otherwise, Trump is going to be able to keep in power indefinitely, sort of like a reverse-FDR, especially when the Constitutional amendment revoking term limits passes.

    This seems to be what Dems always do. Hell, Biden and Lieberman were the two that gave us the DMCA, CDA, SOPA/PIPA and other crap. Now they want to ape China and have IP level censorship. They also made sure student loans were a lifelong debt by removing them from bankrupcy.

    Had t

    • Dems need to be focusing on stuff the American people want, otherwise, Trump is going to be able to keep in power indefinitely, sort of like a reverse-FDR, especially when the Constitutional amendment revoking term limits passes.

      The Florida Orange Man can't change the Constitution. That's for Congress and the states to do, and the GOP doesn't have the necessary margins to ram something like that through. SCOTUS also has zero influence on it as well. https://www.archives.gov/feder... [archives.gov]

      This seems to be what Dems always do. Hell, Biden and Lieberman were the two that gave us the DMCA, CDA, SOPA/PIPA and other crap. Now they want to ape China and have IP level censorship. They also made sure student loans were a lifelong debt by removing them from bankrupcy.

      Had the Dems said that the same thing was to protect against foreign websites that were spreading lies, they would have gotten this, but this sort of shit gets old, and voters are tired of it.

      Makes me wonder if this D-CA has a MAGA hat in a place of worship, secretly, because this only is going to push the Dems further back from any type of majority come 2026.

      Meh... Screwing the general populace in favor of the wealthy is a bipartisan effort. Besides, if the GOP clown show keeps up their antics they'll be lucky if the Democrats don't take supermajorities in both the House and Senate in 2026. Not even two

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      The article only mentions Democrats because the poster hoped that would get Republicans to oppose this. I'm quite certain that a whole slew of congress of both parties would be in favor of this.

  • The problem is hollywood is dying. Not that they have completely lost the support of the american people.

  • They can't be working to increase freedom or anything...

    This is why the Democrats are fucking losers.

    I am so far left the Democrats can't even see me from where they are, I am not trying to make America enslave everyone again, but this is some spectacularly head up ass finger far from the pulse bullshit.

  • So the Dems are investing in VPN and need to push up stock values?
  • Piracy shield [wikipedia.org] is a system that is currently in operation in Italy, and makes ISP responsible to block streaming servers that are retransmitting football matches mainly after a notice from the system. The notice is normally made by either Sky or Dazn.
    Doesn't work to stop streming servers and doesn't work to have more subscription to Dazn or Sky services.
  • Isn't this broadcast flag [wikipedia.org] all over again?

  • Last time I heard, this Lofgren bozo is a CALIFORNIA congress-critter. Passing a law in California to regulate the internet is funny.. Its patently OBVIOUS this bozo (and the rest of the (D) clowns in the California state legislative have ZERO clue how the internet works.. Just more proof you can't cure stupid, but you CAN vote it out (under some conditions, most of which don't apply to COMMIEfornia...)

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