According to the Ministry of Justice’s plan, the Agency for Consumer Protection and Technical Supervision would have the right to issue orders to Internet service providers to block access to websites that infringe copyright in Estonia. According to Peeter P. Mõtsküla, interesting content would still be available despite the ban.
The Ministry of Justice has announced that it will begin to resolve bottlenecks in copyright law. Among the most important changes, the Ministry wants to establish “modern blocking measures to prevent online piracy”, which consist in the fact that the Agency for Consumer Protection and Technical Supervision (TTJA) will have the power to issue orders to suppliers Internet service providers to block access to websites that infringe copyright and related rights.
In order to develop the bill, reference is made to the study “Online Copyright Infringement in EU 2023” commissioned by the EUIPO, according to which “online platforms aimed at piracy are more visited per internet user on the territory of Estonia than in other parts of Europe”, which is why “rights holders, i.e. authors, performers and producers, are deprived of payment.
The authors of the development plan believe that “effective protection of copyright and related rights in the context of making them available to the public is provided by DNS, or Domain Name System blocking and IP-based blocking.” In this case, it does not matter where the service provider’s server is located, because “national Internet service providers limit user access to the network environment in which the crime was committed crime on the territory of Estonia.”
Unfortunately, it appears that ministry officials did not bother to read the EUIPO study to the end. I present the final conclusions presented in the summary of the study:
Gabe Newell, founder and head of Valve Corporation, the well-known PC game developer, publisher and operator of the Steam distribution platform, had stated as early as 2011 that “piracy is almost always a problem with the service.”
Newell explained that if a pirated product can be purchased worldwide 24/7 conveniently via computer, while a legal product can be purchased by the consumer only three months after its entry into the US market, and that too only in a physical store and with regional restrictions, then the pirate’s service is clearly more valuable to the consumer than that offered by the rights holder.
Newell’s thesis is also supported by conclusions n. 2 and no. 5 of the EUIPO: make legal content conveniently accessible to consumers and piracy will disappear on its own. Why bother searching for pirated content when a wide range of legal material is available with little effort and moderate cost?
But Ministry officials still seem to think that we will shut it down and ban it, and then luck will come from our backyard.
I will not come. Those who wish can still obtain the contents that interest them. To bypass local DNS restrictions simply use some foreign name servers, in case of IP-based blocks a VPN service will be useful. Banning its use, however, would be something that fits not the free world, but the repertoire of regimes behind our eastern border.
The commentary reflects the personal opinions of the author.
2024-01-05 07:24:00
peeter-p-motskula-it-is-useless-to-fight-piracy-with-restrictions-on-the-internet-opinion