Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin yesterday said his group plans a major push to impose a site-blocking law in the US. The MPA will "work with members of Congress" to require Internet service providers to block piracy websites, he said during a "state of the industry" address at CinemaCon 2024 in Las Vegas, a convention for movie theater owners.
"This danger [of piracy] continues to evolve, and so must our strategy to defeat it," Rivkin said. "So today, here with you at CinemaCon, I'm announcing the next major phase of this effort: the MPA is going to work with members of Congress to enact judicial site-blocking legislation here in the United States."
A site-blocking law would let copyright owners "request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content," he said. Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy "steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales."
He also told the audience that pirate-site operators "aren't teenagers playing an elaborate prank. The perpetrators are real-life mobsters, organized crime syndicates—many of whom engage in child pornography, prostitution, drug trafficking, and other societal ills. They operate websites that draw in millions of unsuspecting viewers whose personal data can then fall prey to malware and hackers."
AdvertisementRivkin said the industry is already "collaborating with local law enforcement authorities and global cybersecurity experts to identify and investigate illegal piracy operations," but that this alone isn't enough—a site-blocking law is also needed, in the MPA's view.
Lawful content would be blocked, group warns
Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge urged Congress to reject the MPA push, saying that a site-blocking law would threaten the open Internet. "With today's announcement, the MPA has made its intentions crystal clear: It wants to give itself and its members the power to force any Internet infrastructure provider, up to and including the broadband providers that service your home, to cut off access to websites on their say-so alone," said Meredith Rose, the group's senior policy counsel.
The MPA's latest push for a site-blocking law comes about two weeks before a Federal Communications Commission vote to restore net neutrality rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking and throttling websites. The proposed net neutrality rules apply only to lawful content, but opponents of site-blocking legislation fear a blocking law would undermine the goals of net neutrality by compelling ISPs to block both lawful and unlawful content.
Rose said the MPA's requested law would be similar to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was shelved after major protests over a decade ago.
"Nothing has changed since then—not the infrastructure of the Internet that made this unworkable, not the lack of consultation with technologists, and not the back-room dealmaking—except for the brazenness of the industries seeking it. And contrary to MPA's stance, site-blocking does not 'work'—it results in significant over-blocking of lawful content," Rose said.
Over-blocking is inevitable, Big Tech told Congress
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a Big Tech lobby group, told members of Congress in December 2023 that "it is no simple task to craft site-blocking language" that distinguishes "between websites dedicated to infringement and those where incidental infringement occurs by individual users... without erring on the side of over-blocking."
"Over-blocking at risk of silencing permissive free speech should be avoided in lieu of better detection methods that utilize appropriate tailored metrics that only remove unlawful pirated content. These methods require cooperation and data from rightsholders," CCIA CEO Matt Schruers wrote in a submission for a House hearing on piracy.
Rivkin yesterday said that "site-blocking is a common tool in almost 60 countries" and there is "no good reason" for the US not to join that list. "Site-blocking works. It dramatically reduces traffic on piracy sites. It substantially increases visits to legal sites. Simply put, this is a powerful tool to defend what our filmmakers create and what reaches your theaters," Rivkin said.
Schruers told Congress that site-blocking hasn't worked out as well in other countries as the MPA claims. He pointed to cases involving DNS resolvers Cloudflare and Quad9.
After a case filed in 2019, a German court "issued a preliminary ruling directing Cloudflare to block [a website accused of copyright infringement] through both our CDN service and our public resolver," according to Cloudflare. "Cloudflare has no mechanism for blocking websites through 1.1.1.1., and we have never blocked a website through our public resolver. But Cloudflare did take steps to block access to the website in Germany through our CDN and pass-through security service."
AdvertisementThe site in question went offline, but Cloudflare said it continued to litigate the case because of "the underlying legal principles at stake." Cloudflare said it prevailed in November 2023 when a higher court in Germany issued a "decision rejecting a request to require public DNS resolvers like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. to block websites based on allegations of online copyright infringement."
Court cases in US and abroad
In a different German case, Quad9 said that "Sony successfully obtained a preliminary junction against Quad9 with the Regional Court in Hamburg." Quad9 later won the German case on appeal but is now facing a similar case in Italy.
"Italian legal representatives have presented us with a list of domains and a demand for blocking those domains," Quad9 wrote in December 2023. Quad9 said it complied with the request and blocked the domains but will attempt to "fight this demand for censorship."
"Since the courts have provided again no guidance on how we determine if a request is made by someone under Italian jurisdiction, we have applied this block globally," Quad9 said.
In the US, copyright holders have asked courts to compel ISPs to disconnect Internet users accused of pirating content. One such case filed by Sony led to a $1 billion piracy verdict against Cox Communications.
A federal appeals court blocked the $1 billion ruling in February 2024 but didn't let Cox off the hook. Judges affirmed a jury's finding of willful contributory infringement but reversed a finding of vicarious liability and ordered a new damages trial. Cox is asking the Supreme Court to take up the case.
