Hollywood Studios Tried To Add File Sharing Sites To New Zealand's Child Porn Blacklist

[AsAp]

 

We just wrote about the UK's filtering systems blocking access to 20% of the world's top 100,000 sites, even though only about 4% of those host the porn Prime Minister David Cameron seems so obsessed with blocking. Also noted in that story was the fact that many "pirate sites" are being blocked at ISP level via secret court orders. 

MPAA head Chris Dodd absolutely loves web filters, proclaiming them to be the best tool the industry can (ab)use to thwart piracy.

 Speaking recently at the IP Summit in London, Former Senator turned MPAA boss Chris Dodd pronounced his love for forcing ISPs to block and filter websites accused of aiding copyright infringement. Despite the fact filters can be easily bypassed by anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge and often filter legitimate content (a report this week suggests a massive swath of legitimate websites are blocked by UK filters), Dodd believes filters are the "most effective tools anywhere in the world" at fighting piracy.

It appears the studios agree as well, going so far as to attempt to equate the act of piracy with the act of distributing child porn.

 

 

  

The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation (

IWF

) maintains a blocklist of URLs that point to sexual child abuse and criminally obscene adult content. Over in New Zealand the Department of Internal Affairs maintains DCEFS, the Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System. Both are run in cooperation with the countries’ ISPs with the sole aim of keeping the most objectionable material away from public eyes…

 

According to a 

RadioLIVE report

, in order to prevent copyright infringement the studios requested access to the DCEFS child abuse filtering system.

 

After obtaining government permission, Hollywood hoped to add their own list of sites to DCEFS so that by default subscribers to New Zealand’s main ISPs would be prohibited from accessing torrent and other file-sharing type sites.

So, in hopes of protecting their business model, studios tried to add file sharing sites to a list of child pornography sites. Not one of them seemed to realize how wrong it was to equate their companies' profitability with the sexual abuse of children. Whatever level of entitlement these companies have risen to in the past, they've vastly exceeded it with this maneuver. Studios may secretly believe copyright infringement is (very subjectively) as damaging as child pornography, but they've never made it this explicitly clear. 

Fortunately, ISPs and the Kiwi government pushed back, unwilling to be complicit in the studios' most insensitive act of self-preservation yet. Unfortunately for Dodd and his charges, the studios will have to make do with secret court orders and default web filters that still allow end users to flip the "hide file sharing sites" switch to "off." 

The studios believe they should have root access to government-ordained web blocking. In the interest of not making the situation worse than it already is, this should never be granted. Various governments have already included protection for the copyright industries in some of their web-targeted "for the children" legislation. Giving studios the go-ahead to tamper with child porn blacklists would just stretch the definition of "children" to include major Hollywood studios -- entities full of full-grown adults with enough power and money to protect them from anything.