Tag: piracy

When the End Does Not Justify the Means, Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Lesson

“Fair Use” Does Not Justify Piracy

A hand-written note on a white paper that reads 'END ≠ MEANS'.

Image: Author

The stunning announcement on September 5 that AI company Anthropic had agreed to a USD$1.5 billion out-of-court settlement to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors was ground breaking in terms of its size, and goes to disprove the old adage that “the end justifies the means”. It is still not clear if the “end” (i.e. using copyrighted content without authorization to train AI algorithms) is legal, although preliminary indications are that at least in the US this may be the case. However, even if what Anthropic and other AI companies have been doing is ultimately determined to be fair use under US law—which is by no means certain—downloading and storing pirated content is clearly not legal, even if it is to be used for a fair use purpose. In other words, the piracy stands alone and must be judged as such, separate from whatever ultimate use to which the pirated content may be put.

Ironically, in the end, Anthropic did not even use much of the pirated content it had collected for training its platform, Claude. It seems to have had second thoughts about using content from online pirate libraries such as LibGen (Library Genesis) and PiLiMi (Pirate Library Mirror) and instead went out and purchased single physical copies of many works, disassembling and then digitizing them page by page for its Central Library, after which it destroyed the hard copies. Why go to all this trouble? Why not just access a legal online library? That’s because when you access a digital work, you don’t actually purchase it. You purchase a licence to use it, and that licence comes with conditions, such as likely prohibiting use for AI training. Anthropic would have been exposing itself to additional legal risk by violating the terms of the licence, so instead of negotiating a training licence, they took the easy way out by downloading content from pirate sites LibGen and PiLiMi. Later, having second thoughts, they purchased physical copies of the works they wanted to ingest and then scanned them. But it was too late. The piracy had already occurred.

When the decision in the Bartz v Anthropic case was released this summer, I commented that the findings were a mixed bag for AI developers. A very expensive mixed bag, it turns out. In the Anthropic case, there were clearly some interim “wins” for the AI industry. Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the works of the plaintiffs (authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who filed a class action suit) was ruled by the judge (William Alsup) to be “exceedingly tranformative” thus tipping the scales to qualify as a fair use. In addition, he ruled that Anthropic’s unauthorized digitization of the purchased books to also be fair and not infringing. However, it was the downloading and storing of the pirated works that got Anthropic into hot water. Even though the intended use of the pirated works was to train Claude, a so-called transformative fair use, this did not excuse the piracy. While Alsup did not specifically rule that use of pirated materials invalidates a fair use determination (i.e. he ruled that the piracy and the AI training were separate acts), his ruling exposes a weak flank for the AI companies. For example, the US Copyright Office has stated that the knowing use of pirated or illegally accessed works as training data weighs against a fair-use defence. In short, the end does not justify the means.

The piracy finding was significant because Judge Alsup decreed that this element of the case would be sent to a jury to determine the extent of damages. (In Canada and the UK, judges rather than juries normally play this role). Given that under US law statutory damages start at $750 for each work infringed but can go up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, Anthropic could have been on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in damages for the almost 500,000 works at issue. (Over 7 million works were inventoried by the pirate websites and downloaded by Anthropic but the limitations on who qualifies for the class action reduced the number of actionable works to just 7 percent of the total). As deep as its pockets are (Anthropic is backed by Amazon), if a jury awarded damages toward the higher end of the scale, the company could have been bankrupted.

Thus, Anthropic had lots of incentive to settle (including keeping the fair use findings unchallenged). As it stands, the $1.5 billion payout, while large in total, amounts only to about $3000 per infringed work, not the minimum but not really financially significant for the plaintiffs. This amount will probably have to be split between authors and publishers, with some of the funds covering costs, so no authors are going to be buying a new house on the proceeds. The real beneficiaries will be the law firms that represented them. The messy process of deciding who gets what that has led Judge Alsup to suspend the proposed settlement in its current form and require greater clarity as to how the payouts will be managed. The number of works eligible for payment is limited by the fact that to qualify they have to meet three criteria;

1) they were downloaded by Anthropic from LibGen or PiLiMi in August 2022

2) they have an ISBN or ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) and, importantly,

 3) they were registered with the US Copyright Office (USCO) within five years of publication, and prior to either June 2021 or July 2022, (depending on the library at issue).

Any other works do not qualify. Registration with the USCO is not a requirement for copyright protection but in a peculiarity of US law, without registration a copyright holder cannot bring legal action in the US.

While the settlement has been welcomed in copyright circles, and could set a standard for settlement in other pending cases where pirated material has been downloaded for AI training by companies such as META and OpenAI, it doesn’t settle the overriding question of whether the unauthorized use of non-pirated materials for AI training is legal. With the settlement, the Anthropic case is closed, including with respect to the fair use findings. There will be no appeal, another benefit for Anthropic. However, there are still a number of other cases working their way through the US courts, so the question of whether unauthorized use of copyrighted content for AI training constitutes fair use is far from settled.

The Anthropic settlement, especially its size, has caught people’s attention. It may result in AI developers deciding it is better to resort to licensing solutions to access content rather than risking the uncertain results of litigation. On the other hand, payments like this could be one-offs, a speed bump for deep pocketed AI companies who will continue to trample on the rights of creators if they can get away with it. In the Anthropic case, while the company must destroy its pirated database, it is not required to “unlearn” the pirated content that it ingested. Moreover, even if this case leads to more payments to authors, which would be welcome, there are still many copyright-related conundra to be resolved. It should not be necessary to have to constantly resort to litigation to assert creator’s rights given that, as the Anthropic case shows, only a very limited number of rightsholders benefit from specific cases. Broad licensing solutions are required. This would also help address the problem of AI platforms producing outputs that bear close resemblance to, or compete with, the content on which they have been trained.

While Bartz v Anthropic is a decision that applies only to the US, and only to this one very specific circumstance, it will be studied closely elsewhere in countries that do not follow the unpredictable US process of determining fair use, for example in fair dealing countries like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, and in EU countries. In Canada, the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for training commercial AI models is a live issue. With the possible exception of research, unauthorized use such as that undertaken by Anthropic is unlikely to fall into any of the fair dealing categories (in Canada, they are education, research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, parody and satire) nor is there a Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception in Canadian law. As Canada and other countries come to grips with the copyright/AI training dilemma, the principle of how content is accessed will surely be an important principle. Just as fair use (if indeed AI training is determined to be fair use) does not justify piracy in the US, licit access is required in Canada to exercise fair dealing user rights, including where TPM’s (technological protection measures, aka digital locks) are in place to protect that content.

Judge Alsup’s decision upholds the important principle that the end (if legal) does not justify the means (if illegal). This is a key takeaway from the Anthropic case, imperfect as the outcomes of that case were. Meanwhile the legal process of determining how and on what terms AI developers should have access to copyrighted content to train their algorithms continues.

© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved.

“You’ve Got Malware!” Wonder Why?

Detailed Academic Study of Five Southeast Asian Countries Clearly Demonstrates Close Correlation Between Piracy Sites and Malware Infection

A person sitting at a wooden table using a laptop, with a malware warning displayed on the screen.

Image: Shutterstock

You won’t get a message like this announcing you’ve just downloaded malware. Instead, you will find out when unauthorized payments start showing up on your credit card statement, or worse, you find that your bank account has been drained or you’ve received a ransomware threat, suddenly locked out of your accounts. No one knowingly downloads malware, but it is a proven byproduct of content piracy. Although a global threat, malware penetration is particularly problematic for emerging economies, like those in Southeast Asia working to build viable local content industries and creating safe digital platforms to grow their economy. A recently released study (“Consumer Risk from Piracy in Southeast Asia”) authored by Macquarie University professor Dr. Paul Watters, concludes that the risk of downloading malware in the form of trojans, worms or keyloggers, ransomware and cryptojacking, phishing and credential theft, spyware, data exfiltration and network compromise is up to sixty-five times higher when using piracy versus legitimate sites.

Watters examined the prevalence of malware downloading and piracy in five Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malayia, Thailand and Singapore. He examined various types of piracy sites, including illicit streaming, streaming sports piracy, P2P networks, scam piracy sites (sites masquerading as providers of legal services or content), IPTV piracy subscription services, as well as anime and manga piracy sites. The relative cyber risk per piracy service type in the five countries studied in 2025 ranged from a high of sixty-five times the risk of using legitimate services for P2P networks to figures in the low to high thirties for streaming and IPTV services to fourteen percent for manga sites. (see table below).

Bar graph illustrating the relative cyber risk by piracy service type in Southeast Asia for the year 2025, comparing risk levels for P2P networks, scam piracy portals, streaming services, IPTV services, anime sites, and manga sites.

Watters points out that, “Digital piracy in Southeast Asia extends far beyond lost revenues, reshaping cultural norms, creative ecosystems and regional economies.”  While there are economic motivations for piracy, such as unwillingness to pay for content that can be obtained for “free”, social consensus (where piracy is normalized within a community) significantly influences individuals’ intentions to engage in piracy. Social and cultural norms rather than differences in legal frameworks, copyright tradition, or economic factors have been shown to be the most powerful predictors of piracy behaviour among students. These unhealthy trends, once normalized, undermine the basis for building a stable digital economy where business models are based on the normal expectation of receiving a reasonable return on investment for products or services provided. Also, in the case of Southeast Asian countries, they pose a long-term threat to the preservation and projection of regional cultures. If local content producers cannot receive fair compensation for their investment in production, there is less incentive to produce content based on local cultural heritage. And it is not just local cultural industries that suffer. The diversion of revenues away from legitimate businesses affects government revenues, having an impact on the full range of services offered to citizens by governments, while undermining government efforts to build a trusted digital economy so essential to SMEs and others.

While the figures documenting cyberthreats are startling and should give users of piracy sites pause to weigh the consequences of accessing “free” content, it is also incumbent on governments to take requisite action to dissuade their citizens from indulging their own worst instincts. Watters’ study highlights some of the measures that Southeast Asian governments are already engaged in, such as implementing comprehensive national cybersecurity strategies. All the countries in the region have criminalized unauthorized access, malware distribution and online fraud and have engaged in education and international cooperation. However, this is clearly not adequate in dealing with the significant problem of malware penetration.

Watters suggests a number of additional actions that could be taken, depending on the specific risk factors by country. These include revisiting domain-blocking frameworks to incorporate dynamic copyright-based site blocking injunctions updated in real time rather than relying on static “blacklists” (the pirates are nimble and often manage to stay one step ahead of the blocking process). There are specific recommendations for actions by ISPs and enterprise network operators. There is also the suggestion that regulators introduce minimum security standards for consumer electronics to combat the risk presented by Illicit Streaming Devices (ISDs) and user-installed P2P/streaming clients.

It is clear from Watters’ report that more needs to be done by Southeast Asian governments to protect consumers and reduce their exposure to the elevated cyber risk from accessing piracy platforms, a risk thoroughly and professionally documented in this study. The need is urgent, based not only on the demonstrated level of malware penetration through piracy sites but also the long-term negative impact such risks have on individual consumers. A corollary benefit is that combatting patronage of piracy sites will have a positive impact on generation of local cultural content and build out of digital industries, while strengthening the legitimate economy and government revenues.

As has been proven elsewhere, a comprehensive anti-piracy program focusing on dynamic copyright-based site blocking (with appropriate transparency and redress mechanisms), strengthened law enforcement expertise in combatting cyber-crime, and continued education and public awareness campaigns tailored to local conditions will enable governments in Southeast Asia to turn the tide on cyber security threats while at the same time enjoying the many economic and cultural benefits of reduced piracy among their citizens.

Southeast Asian consumers are entitled to expect that when they engage on the Internet, they can do so safely without fearing the consequences of malware attacks. While they need to take some responsibility for their own actions, it is incumbent on their governments to create a safe space through adequate regulation and enforcement. Professor Watters’ study provides not only a detailed analysis of what is happening with respect to consumer risks from piracy, but a roadmap of how to effectively deal with the problem.

© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Site Blocking is Back on the US Agenda: It’s Long Overdue


Image: Shutterstock

It seems as if I’ve been writing about site blocking (what I prefer to call “disabling access to offshore pirate content sites”, although this is a bit of a mouthful) forever, certainly since it was effectively pioneered by the UK, Australia and various EU countries a decade or more ago, followed later by Canada and others. The first blog post on the topic I wrote back in 2016 (“Blocking Offshore Pirate Websites: It Can be Both Effective and Manageable“) cited a study from Carnegie Mellon University that examined the effectiveness of internet site blocking to control copyright piracy in the UK. It showed that the measures caused a drop of 90% in visits to the blocked sites, leading to a 22% decrease in total piracy for all users affected by the blocks while increasing visits to paid legal streaming sites. Building on this research, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, DC, based industry think-tank, expanded on the study to extrapolate the UK example to the (then) 24 other countries that maintained some form of internet site blocking against offshore copyright infringers. Today more than 50 countries do so–but not the US. That may be about to change, and that change is long overdue.

The 2016 ITIF study (“How Website Blocking Is Curbing Digital Piracy Without “Breaking the Internet”) very effectively ran through and debunked the range of arguments that site blocking opponents put up to oppose instituting reasonable and transparent measures to protect copyrighted content on the internet, content being exploited by copyright infringing pirate offshore websites operating beyond the reach of domestic law. These objections included;

(1) too costly (for ISPs) to implement,
(2) technically difficult and might cause disruptions in the functioning of the internet
(3) can be easily bypassed,
(4) interferes with the free flow of information on the internet
(5) violates net neutrality…

And so on. All hogwash and horsefeathers.

A year later I was writing about site-blocking again, but in an Australian, EU and Asian context. (“Disabling Access to Large-Scale Pirate Sites (Site Blocking)—It Works!“). Australia was one of the pioneers of site blocking, bringing in its first legislation in 2015. At first there was the usual opposition from ISPs, but as the regime began to work and costs kept nominal, the results started to speak for themselves. The opposition dropped away and the legal process around obtaining site blocking orders became routinized. Several European countries were also experimenting with site blocking models, notably Portugal, Italy and France. In Asia, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand brought in site blocking mechanisms, either through court orders or administrative tribunals.

In Canada, the courts were reluctant to wade into the issue absent explicit authority to do so. In response, a coalition of content owners put together a proposal for an administrative agency to adjudicate and administer a site blocking regime, called Fair Play Canada. Predictably, the “usual suspects”, such as TechDirt in the US and Canada’s own anti-copyright crusader Michael Geist, came out in opposition. I rebutted these arguments at the time, as did others (probably more effectively). Regrettably, the telecoms regulator, the CRTC, whose authority was required to enable Fair Play to set up an administrative tribunal, ducked the issue, claiming it did not have the authority under the Telecommunications Act to make such a decision. Michael Geist claimed that the absence of a court order was a fatal flaw. And then, voilà, something unusual happened. The Federal Court of Canada (FCC) decided to exercise its authority. The so-called “fatal flaw” of a lack of a court order was remedied.

In its groundbreaking GoldTV case, the Federal Court issued an order requiring all of Canada’s major ISPs to undertake domain name server (DNS) and IP address blocking against the defendants, GoldTV.biz and GoldTV.ca, who naturally, being offshore pirate sites, failed to appear. The order was unopposed by all the ISPs with one exception–Teksavvy, a small reseller of internet access. (The appeal was joined by CIPPIC, the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, founded by Michael Geist). The appeal was dismissed, and the issuance of site blocking orders in Canada by the FCC has become as routinized as in Australia, the UK and elsewhere. The orders have proven effective as one tool amongst others to protect investment in content and fight online piracy, and have been expanded to include dynamic injunctions. Dynamic injunctions target the content rather than a specific Internet address, thus allowing the blocking order to shift to whatever address the pirated feed is coming from. So effective has the site blocking mechanism in Canada become that it was recently cited by the US based Digital Citizens Alliance as a model of what the US should adopt.

The US content industry has not been able to deploy the tool of site blocking ever since the PIPA/SOPA fiasco killed that option more than a decade ago. The “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) had wind in its sails and seemed likely to pass Congress without significant opposition until attacked by cyber-libertarians stoked up by Silicon Valley. The main argument to sow panic was the discredited argument that site blocking would “break the internet”. This has been shown time and again to be nonsense as highlighted in a fairly recent study released by ITIF, “A Decade After SOPA/PIPA, It’s Time to Revisit Website Blocking”. That was back in early 2022. Now something is finally happening in the US Congress.

At the end of January, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the Foreign Anti Digital Piracy Act (FAPDA). Under this draft legislation, a blocking order would apply only to illegal content and would have to be issued by a US court, with due process and judicial oversight, supported by clear evidence of copyright infringement. Sounds reasonable to me, yet it has brought out the old arguments against it. (Lofgren herself opposed the original SOPA proposal but now believes the safeguards are adequate and the scope sufficiently targetted). One example of the opposition to FAPDA comes from Micheal O’Reilly, former FCC Commissioner, claiming that site blocking comes “with a host of problems”. ReCreate, “Innovators, Creators and Consumers United for Balanced Copyright” also opposes it.

“FADPA and similar ‘site-blocking’ proposals would give Big Content the internet killswitch it has sought for decades. Copyright is hotly contested and infamously easy to use as a cudgel against free speech online.”

More offbase hyperbole.

In response, the Copyright Alliance published a detailed blog post written by Kevin Madigan, SVP for Policy and Government Affairs. Labelled “The Facts About Judicial Blocking of Foreign Piracy Sites”, Madigan goes through and carefully rebuts with facts the misleading arguments put forward by O’Reilly. (I note the term “site blocking” has been replaced with “judicial blocking”, which I think is a sound idea as site blocking is a misleading term, playing into the hands of extreme “internet freedom” advocates).

The facts, as outlined by Madigan are:

• Judicial blocking is consistent with free speech
• ISPs face no legal risk for complying with judicial blocking orders
• Judicial site blocking is highly effective
• Judicial site blocking is entirely consistent with net neutrality

It is slightly amusing, but extremely frustrating, to see the necessity of having to rebut, yet again, the specious arguments put forward against a judicial blocking regime. The same tired old arguments were trotted out in Australia, Europe, and Canada to try to scare legislators and consumers, claiming that selective, judicially supervised and mandated blocking of access to illegal offshore websites would somehow violate free speech, lead to violations of privacy, would break the internet and be contrary to net neutrality–and would not work anyway. As Madigan puts it in his blog, this is “balderdash”.

Whether the term is hogwash, horsefeathers, balderdash or hyperbole (not to mention misinformation and disinformation), the opposition to judicial blocking of carefully selected offshore pirate websites is hard to understand—unless I guess you are a cyber-libertarian. But the internet is not a rule-of-law free zone. Illegal content, especially when hosted offshore beyond the reach of domestic courts, does not deserve special protection. The experience of countries around the world has shown that blocking access to offshore pirate sites works in terms of fighting piracy and encouraging take up of legitimate content, without breaking the internet or infringing on basic freedoms. It is time the US joined the club.

© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Canada (Finally) Does Something Right on Copyright Protection: According to US Study, Canada’s Site Blocking Process is Worth Emulating

Report Cover: Used with Permission of DCA

It is a foggy Friday when a report out of the US heaps praise on Canada for anything in the area of intellectual property. But surprise, it just happened! Canadians are more used to being chastised (often with good reason, I hasten to add) by US industry groups such as the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), or in the annual “Special 301” report issued by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) which is compiled from complaints brought forward from various US industry groups. This year’s Section 301 report once again placed Canada on USTR’s “Watch List”. According to USTR, the Watch List is used to designate US trading partners that “merit bilateral attention to address underlying IP problems“. A perennial favourite on the Watch List, this year Canada joins 19 other countries including such IP powerhouses as Turkmenistan, Algeria, Belarus and Bulgaria (the only EU member state on the list). Is this an objective assessment? Maybe, maybe not.

It’s not that the US itself is purer than the driven snow (the snow no doubt being part of the “cold air from Canada” that features regularly on US weather reports) when it comes to IP protection. It’s just that USTR does not report on the US’s own transgressions, as it has no mandate to do so. I gave it a helping hand a few months ago when I filed my own Watch List recommendation, (The USTR Watch List Designation You Will Never See), which “playfully” (as one of my readers commented), put the US on the list for a range of copyright lapses. Among the most serious was a complete absence of any workable mechanism to block or disable offshore pirate content websites. I pointed out that the US is the largest market for pirated content globally, with 13.5 billion visits to pirate sites annually according to Variety, yet is one of the few not to have a system to disable distribution of pirated content from offshore, often known by the shorthand term “site blocking”.

I personally don’t like the term “site blocking” as it implies some form of government censorship. It should more accurately be called “disabling access to offshore pirate websites” but that is too much of a mouthful, so we will have to go with the shorthand version. Site blocking, which is practiced in more than 50 countries, including Canada, (but not the US) is normally instituted after a judicial or administrative process, requiring substantial justification, whereby content owners seek remedies against offshore websites (which are located in jurisdictions beyond the reach of domestic law) that distribute pirated content and undermine licensed distribution. The remedies normally involve injunctions requiring domestic internet providers to block identified pirate sites. It was pioneered by the UK and Australia, where it has been overwhelmingly successful in curtailing distribution of pirated content and encouraging uptake of legitimate, licensed alternatives.

In Canada, application for a blocking order is made to the Federal Court by content owners (such as Rogers or Bell Media), often to cover streaming of high-profile sports games. Owners of the sites to be blocked can appear and argue against the order, but being offshore pirate sites, none do. Once issued, ISPs (internet service providers), who are the actual targets of the orders, are obliged to disable/block the pirated content stream so that viewers cannot receive it. Originally some ISPs, notably TekSavvy, opposed the orders although the major ISPs, some of which are owned by the owners or licensees of the sports content, went along without a fuss. TekSavvy’s objections were dismissed, as I wrote about here (Appeal Against Canada’s First Successful Pirate Site-Blocking Order is Dismissed: Good News for Copyright Protection in Canada), and the process has become more or less routine.

Recently the regime in Canada has been strengthened by the granting of dynamic injunctions. Dynamic injunctions allow flexibility, targeting the content rather than a specific Internet address, thus allowing the blocking order to shift to whatever address the pirated feed is coming from. It is a common tactic of pirate sites to shift IP address regularly as one means of evading the court authorized blocking order. Dynamic injunctions help to counter this tactic.

If site blocking is such an essential tool in the anti-piracy toolbox, then why doesn’t it exist in the US, a country with a huge economic stake in the production and distribution of legitimate content, and unfortunately a market where piracy is as common or more common than in many other countries? US stakeholders tried, unsuccessfully, to secure passage of site blocking legislation more than a decade ago, with the introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) into Congress in 2011. While widely supported by content industries and many members of Congress, it became the target of attack by cyber-libertarians stoked up by Silicon Valley. In an attention catching gimmick, Wikipedia and Reddit blacked out for a day, January 18, 2012, in protest. The legislation went into the “too difficult” basket and has never been revived.

The specious argument was put forward that SOPA would “break the internet” and interfere with the free flow of information. That was ridiculous then, and it is ridiculous now, as the successful establishment of site blocking in over 50 countries globally, including well established democracies such as the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, the Nordic countries, India, Australia—and Canada—clearly shows. That point, along with data demonstrating the proven efficacy of site blocking, is among the key themes of a new study just published in the US by the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), commissioned from research firm IP House.

The DCA is a “consumer-focused group whose mission is to raise awareness among the public and policymakers about how to make the Internet safer”. Its latest report, “Overseas and Out of Reach: International Video Piracy and US Options to Combat It”, not only debunks the “break the internet” nonsense, but goes on to discuss the economic damage caused by pirate operations to legitimate business and government revenues. It also puts the spotlight on how piracy feeds revenue to organized crime, outlines the risk to consumers of clandestine installation of malware, explains how site blocking works, and documents the effectiveness of site blocking (as one essential tool among others) in combatting video streaming and Video-on-Demand piracy services. The unspoken bottom line message is that Congress should start looking seriously at reviving site blocking legislation.

To quote from the report’s introduction;

“The United States faces a problem. Overseas criminals targeting Americans often live in countries that won’t prosecute them or lack adequate legal tools to do so – leaving them beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement and secure in the notion they won’t face any consequences for their illegal activity.  One example: Overseas operators of illegal piracy websites and apps make $2.3 billion a year – while also using that stolen content to bait Internet users so they can infect devices with malware or steal credit card information.

One solution adopted by Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia and over 50 other countries: if they can’t reach the overseas criminals targeting their citizens to deter them, then they block the websites of those criminals so they can’t reach their citizens.”

So there you have it. Canada is cited as an exemplar in this regard. What a refreshing change. Let’s hope the study gets the attention it deserves in the US and in Congress because combatting piracy is something that is in everyone’s interest, from law enforcement to film and TV production to consumers.

Let’s be clear. Damage to US film and TV production hurts Canada, given the almost $8 billion that was invested in such production in Canada in 2023 by foreign, mostly US, producers. While the majority of it was foreign location and service (FLS) filming, it also included $1 billion in financing for Canadian owned content production. Canada may have managed to establish a workable site-blocking regime, using the courts, but there is still much more that needs to be done in Canada and elsewhere to combat the threat of online content piracy. The Overseas and Out of Reach study is a valuable contribution to this debate.

© Hugh Stephens, 2024. All Rights Reserved.