Sweeping legal ruling orders ISPs to block pirate sites

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

One of the broadest such rulings to date has been made by a sweeping order demanding internet service providers block a set of pirate sites.

In late April, a New York district judge ruled in favor of the three sites that were sued for rebroadcasting mostly Hebrew-language television. The rightsholders demanded monetary damages from the site operators, who didn't show up in court, and an injunction to prevent viewers from accessing the services. Judge Failla ordered a list of internet service providers to block Israeli-TV.com, Israel.tv, and Sdarot.com. Users should instead be directed to a page that notifies them of the block.

It's not just the internet service providers that are affected. Web hosting providers, web designers, domain name registration services, and advertising companies are not allowed to do business with the sites.

Blocks orders can be asked for by Copyright suits. The scope of the injunction and listing that many players in it is beyond the norm, says the senior policy counsel of the nonprofit Public Knowledge. Third parties are supposed to get a chance to show up in court and contest blocking orders, which raises the barrier to demanding them. That doesn't seem to have happened in this case.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt outlines that the order is reminiscent of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that was scuttled after widespread protests in 2012 It is exactly what foreign piracy sites would have been banned if the bill had passed. This is a dream scenario for a lot of them, because they want to be able to go into court and quickly and easily get one order that they could hold out to the world.

The defendants could still contest the order. It is not clear what the biggest players are going to be. AT&T didn't respond to a request for comment on whether it would dispute the decision. Charter didn't immediately respond to the request. We only recently learned about it and the implications and are still examining it, said a spokeswoman for the company.

Rose acknowledges that it is difficult to shut down foreign piracy sites at their source instead of trying to ban third parties from dealing with them. There are ways to respect due process, and we need to work on those.