Discussed recently:

Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821388 - April 2021 (90 comments)

Actually it's rather unclear whether there's even a proposal.

As an individual what can I do to most effectively stop this bullshit? The constant overreach and expansion of IP law disastrous for humans. I want it to stop. Who do I donate to? Where do I march? I want to effect real change.

I'm increasingly uncomfortable keeping my head down about this. It needs to be addressed, this concern needs to be signal-boosted somehow among the majority of people who just don't fucking give a shit. People shouldn't be okay with this. Most people are completely oblivious to the second and third order effects that are hurting them as a result of the INSANE IP laws that are on the books now. Is there any hope for real change? I'm ready to start donating some double digit percentage of my income for a start. My time too.

It’s funny, if you had told me this was going to be introduced when DMCA was, I would have said Canadians would literally switch ISPs in order to avoid this.

Now, I’m not so sure. Content blocking on YouTube and the occasional DMCA takedown notice on a Google web search tend to be the only hints you get of piracy online.

Most people used to pirate all kinds of media, now we’ve Spotify and YouTube and Netflix and Disney+, etc. It’s never been easier to skip the physical disc and listen or watch media for free.

That said, I could see unintended consequences. For example, this might be intended for piracy but we should keep in mind that our ISPs are often the ones owning significant media properties in Canada.

Imagine Bell Canada getting the green light to block piracy services and deciding that any service which lets you watch content internationally, such as a VPN service, should be blocked in Canada and the content along with it?

At what point would ISPs interpret this as a way to protect their IP-based business models?

And at what point might the system open up to DMCA or YouTube style content strikes vs proper determination of copyright infringement. I’d be furious if GitHub repos started disappearing when tools, especially for education, are distinct from copyrighted materials being shared.

I could even imagine a future where adblockers are considered copyright infringement because they modify the page or stream that the rights holder intended to serve. Once you allow ISPs to meddle with traffic on their own, they might not know where to stop, given a few decades.

If you have comments for the Canadian government on this matter, an email is provided on this page: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00192.html

Apparently your comment may be made public, FYI.

I encourage everyone to make your voice heard, we’ve all had our interactions with pirated media. I learned graphic design after pirating my first copy of Photoshop, now Adobe has a customer for life. Think about how you can demonstrate the tangible (and intangible) value of piracy on the economy and society as a whole. The value is obvious for us, but clearly less obvious to lawmakers.

Also worth noting that the most effective piracy measures have come from market forces: competition with the actual process of piracy. Netflix has effectively eliminated the need for movie piracy and did so simply by providing a simpler option. They use industry developed DRM. Who needs government enforcement of IP?

After blocking the pirate torrent sites, will they block torrent p2p traffic in general or information about torrents or GitHub projects for foss torrent software? How to articles? Will they block VPNs used to get around this? Will tor go offline because it enables piracy? Maybe this is a good law but there are a lot of bad versions of it

Deindexing? Oh please do - piracy will survive fine without. Even better - we’ll do it in the shadows as we previously did.

They blocked pirate bay and others in ireland in 2009 and all it did was stop the less than tech savvy from accessing them, and those people weren't torrenting content anyway. This isn't going to change anything

They'd have to block sites that tell you how to work around their efforts to block sites. And that's not going to happen anytime soon in the West. So it's essentially more theater.

Deindexing/blocking these sites is a reasonable step. Australia did so in 2018, resulting in a 5% increase to visits to legal sites:

https://www.mpa-apac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Australi...

It seems unreasonable to have websites openly flouting copyright law. Additionally, for software like games, the files are usually full of malware.

Is it just me, or access to legal content is getting more complicated? How about putting all those lobbying funds for a good use and building a single platform that allows anyone to access movies, TV shows etc. for a decently priced subscription, without region blocking shenanigans?

I believe the UK tried to do the same thing, but these blocks are easily circumvented. You can just go to unblockit.club (or whatever the name is at at the time) and access many of these sites.

Ideally all sites should be deindexed, then maybe companies like Google would cease to exist and all this tracking nonsense would end. Just daydreaming...

Don't most people who pirate these days use a VPN anyways? I don't see how this is going to do anything.

Wasting all those resources for old industries that failed to modernize while at the same time the people named in the Panama Papers have been subject to no investigations.

> In addition to site-blocking and search engine de-indexing, courts should also be able to order online service providers to prevent infringing content from being re-uploaded, or to suspend or terminate access to infringing customers.

Does this mean the courts would permanently terminate someone’s access to the Internet? If so, why stop there? “You used this electricity to power your computer and this water supply to stay hydrated during your criminal activities, so we are banning access to both for life”.

It’s also chilling to see deindexing from search engines proposed. Canada has free speech problems already, for example recently with a parent being prevented from speaking to the public about his situation (https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/father-gagged-found-gui...), where he wants to stop his daughter (a minor) from receiving life altering procedures without his consent. That suppression of speech is authoritarian enough, but in the future I could see this proposed anti-piracy law setting a precedent for deindexing news, opinions, studies, and other content that run afoul of their ever-expanding definitions of “hate speech”.