HN Debrief

European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage

  • Regulation
  • Copyright
  • Infrastructure
  • Europe
  • Privacy

TorrentFreak reports that EuroISPA, a European ISP trade group, wants rightsholders held financially accountable when anti-piracy blocking orders take down lawful traffic along with infringing streams. The immediate backdrop is the live sports crackdown in Spain and Italy, where broad blocking tied to soccer broadcasts has reportedly broken access to ordinary websites and services, especially when large shared providers like Cloudflare get caught in the blast radius. EuroISPA’s point is simple: if rightsholders can demand fast blocking with little downside, they will keep pushing for aggressive measures while ISPs and users absorb the damage.

If your product depends on shared hosting, CDNs, or cross-border internet infrastructure, copyright enforcement can now become an uptime and legal-risk issue, not just a policy debate. Watch EU blocking rules country by country and plan for overblocking as an operational failure mode.

Discussion mood

Strongly supportive of making rightsholders liable for overblocking, with anger focused on Spain and Italy’s soccer-driven blocking regimes, frustration at weak penalties for false claims, and a broader fear that once censorship infrastructure exists it gets reused far beyond the original justification.

Key insights

  1. 01

    DMCA perjury language is mostly toothless

    The oft-cited DMCA warning about filing notices under penalty of perjury does far less than many assume. Commenters point out that the perjury language covers the claimant’s authority to act for the copyright owner, not the correctness or narrowness of the takedown itself, which helps explain why abusive notices can be routine and still carry little real risk.

    Do not assume formal legal language creates meaningful deterrence. If your platform or company is exposed to notice-and-takedown systems, design for abuse at the process level because the statutory penalty may not protect you.

      Attribution:
    • poizan42 #1
    • tgsovlerkhgsel #1
    • robocat #1
    • kg #1
  2. 02

    Filtering capability itself creates new obligations

    The UK Cleanfeed example shows how a tool built for one narrow purpose can become the reason courts order you to block something else. Once an ISP already has filtering infrastructure, rightsholders can argue that using it for copyright enforcement is cheap and easy, while providers without such tooling can still argue the cost is open-ended and unreasonable.

    Be careful what enforcement features you normalize in your stack. A capability added for an exceptional case can later become evidence that broader compliance is trivial and therefore mandatory.

      Attribution:
    • btasker #1
    • tialaramex #1
  3. 03

    This is a long-running EU policy fight

    The filing is not a sudden response to AI companies wanting more training data. It is part of the European Commission’s ongoing review of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, and commenters note that EuroISPA has been raising the same complaint repeatedly because existing anti-piracy measures showed limited gains while overblocking kept getting worse.

    Treat this as regulatory drift, not a one-off news cycle. If you operate in Europe, track consultation processes early because the shape of enforcement is being set in these repeated review rounds.

      Attribution:
    • braiamp #1
  4. 04

    The cost lands on ordinary internet users

    The visible harm is not just a few support tickets or annoyed pirates. Commenters in Spain describe routine failures during major soccer matches, broken access to developer tools and Cloudflare-backed sites, and large amounts of lost work time imposed on people who have nothing to do with infringement.

    Model overblocking as downtime with labor cost, customer harm, and trust damage. If your service has users in affected regions, incident response should include the possibility that a third party’s copyright block caused the outage.

      Attribution:
    • samgranieri #1
    • gadrev #1
    • londons_explore #1
    • expo98 #1

Against the grain

  1. 01

    Pure court-first enforcement favors the rich

    The clean slogan of "get a court judgment first" sounds principled but can hand even more power to whoever can afford lawyers. Commenters with civil court experience argue that forcing every dispute into litigation can crush small defendants through process cost alone, even when they did nothing wrong, so fast takedown systems still solve a real access-to-justice problem if they include meaningful penalties for abuse.

    Do not frame the choice as instant blocking versus full litigation. Better systems will need low-cost enforcement paths for legitimate complaints plus automatic penalties when claimants overreach.

      Attribution:
    • john01dav #1
    • gortok #1
  2. 02

    Some censorship is plainly legitimate

    The absolutist claim that censorship is always bad fell flat for people pointing to child sexual abuse material, doxxing, revenge porn, and credible threats. That does not justify broad copyright overblocking, but it does force a more precise argument centered on proportionality, due process, and who decides, rather than pretending all content removal is morally equivalent.

    When arguing against overblocking, ground the case in bad incentives and sloppy scope. Blanket anti-censorship rhetoric is easy to dismiss and weakens stronger objections.

      Attribution:
    • nonethewiser #1 #2 #3

In plain english

AI ↩
Artificial intelligence, software systems that generate or analyze content in ways that mimic tasks usually associated with human intelligence.
Cleanfeed ↩
A filtering system originally used by BT in the UK to block access to certain illegal material, later cited in copyright blocking cases.
Cloudflare ↩
A large internet infrastructure company that provides security, caching, and traffic routing for many websites, often sharing network resources across many customers.
Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive ↩
A European Union copyright law framework that updates rules for digital platforms, licensing, and enforcement across member states.
DMCA ↩
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a United States law that includes a notice-and-takedown system for alleged online copyright infringement.
EuroISPA ↩
A trade association representing internet service providers and related companies across Europe.
ISP ↩
Internet Service Provider, a company that gives users and businesses access to the internet.

Reference links

Law and legal background

  • 17 U.S. Code § 512
    Referenced to show what the DMCA actually puts under penalty of perjury in a takedown notice.
  • Shouting fire in a crowded theater
    Cited in the free speech subthread about the limits of protected speech and how that phrase is often misused.
  • United States v. Handley
    Linked in a side discussion about whether fictional or generated sexual images involving minors are treated the same as CSAM under US law.

Regional examples of blocking

  • hayahora.futbol
    Shared as a site that tracks whether soccer-related blocking is disrupting internet access in Spain at a given moment.

Company and service references

  • Andrews & Arnold
    Mentioned as a UK ISP whose lack of censorship tooling changed how vulnerable it was to being compelled into blocking regimes.