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Comment by beerlord | Hacker News Reader

The websites offering piracy services or advertising/promoting the availability of pirated content should simply be blocked at a national level. It seems to be working well enough in Australia: piracy visits are down 50%, piracy volumes are down 25%. This is following their DNS-based blocking of sites like ThePirateBay a few years ago. Its certainly better than suing people.

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I can use Google for piracy, should that be blocked as well? Search for "NameOfMovie watch online free" and either the top links will be just that or the "DMCA Blocked" link at the bottom will be another website containing exactly that.

Should we block Google?

If not, under what situation would we block other sites? They also just 'link to content' rather than host it themselves.

The industry generates a list of URLs which are submitted to an Australian court to review, then ISPs are instructed to block them.

Of course there are loopholes, but a 53% reduction in vists to piracy sites after about 14 months indicates that the blocking was effective.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/site-blocking-hinders-fewe...

> Of course there are loopholes, but a 53% reduction in vists to piracy sites after about 14 months indicates that the blocking was effective.

How do stats like that even get generated? Don't they assume that one knows literally all piracy going on?

Just because there was a 53% reduction in visits to certain piracy sites, who's gonna say those 53% didn't simply go to other, not tracked/blocked, sites to get what they want?

Does that translate to more media sales? Is all the "whack-a-mole" game even worth the revenue increase? In any case does the increased revenue benefit the australian population?

Fairfax owned SMH were one of the major groups lobbying for these measures, largely due to impact on cable TV sales. It's no surprise they claim they were successful, and it's not one we can consider overly credible.

Around the time these rules came in, Netflix became a thing, and Australian networks started to compete by removing the pattern of putting shows on TV two years after being shown in the US.

I remember when they were promoting a big deal around cliffhangers in Lost, but anyone with ThePirateBay had seen the next two seasons. The fact this situation is largely addressed is why most people around me stopped pirating.

Let's start by dialing back the ridiculous DRM, which makes it a lot more convenient to pirate content, rather than pay for the DRM-laden official releases.

No thanks.

I prefer to help content rights holders fund increasingly broad DRM capabilities which enable control of my devices by unknown third parties. Can't wait until the next "innovation" like this gem comes out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

What ridiculous DRM?

Does this perhaps coincide with services like netflix gaining in popularity?

It probably helped, but piracy site visits were down 53% in 14 months.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/site-blocking-hinders-fewe...

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