The US Is Missing the One Tool That Can Save Our Creative Communities
All the evidence indicates that as site blocking scales up to include the major pirate sites, it creates systemic change — by shifting consumer behavior away from stealing content and toward purchasing it. But just because proper site blocking legislation would make it easier for authorities in America to cut off illegal websites at scale does not mean — as site blocking critics have suggested — that it would open up abuse by rightsholders or negatively impact lawful internet use.
On the contrary, as found by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, well-crafted site blocking legislation and court orders, such as the ones “in Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere have built-in safeguards to ensure that only rights holders with high-quality cases — those involving websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement—are granted an injunction.”
Rather than harming internet freedoms, these well-vetted, court-adjudicated site blocking measures targeting large-scale commercial piracy operations (not sites that accidentally, or incidentally, host pirated material) are associated with countries with the strongest records on internet freedom. In fact, many of the countries that permit judicial site blocking, including Canada, Australia, and the UK, ranked higher than the U.S. in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest annual index of the state of democracy around the world.
