Major Movie and TV Studios Advocates for Site-blocking Law

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is pushing for a new site-blocking law in the US to curb online piracy, according to the organization’s CEO, Charles Rivkin, Ars Technica reported. Speaking at CinemaCon 2024 in Las Vegas, Rivkin announced that the MPA will “work with members of Congress” to require internet service providers to block websites dedicated to sharing pirated content.

One of his main contentions was that the “danger [of piracy] continues to evolve, and so must our strategy to defeat it,” adding that a site-blocking copyright law would allow copyright owners to “request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content.”

It is important to note that the trade group represents major Hollywood studios and thus wields significant influence. Also, this is not the first time it has aimed to push such legislation.

The MPA has historically advocated for stronger copyright enforcement measures to combat online piracy. In the past, the organization has lobbied for laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act in the US, which would have allowed copyright holders to seek court orders to force Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites accused of hosting pirated content. The major argument behind this push has been more or less the same as Rivkin mentioned in his latest address: that piracy “steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars” from the economy.

Is something like this happening in India?

Similar conversations have started to gain traction back in India. Viacom18’s General Counsel, Anil Lale, recently stated that proactive efforts need to be taken to curb online piracy. It is important to note that Viacom18 recently announced a merger with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and Disney and is set to clinch a 46.82% stake in the joint venture. Calling for a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to dealing with piracy, Lale said: “…right now, we go to courts, we take John Doe orders, we take dynamic injunctions, we use that to go to ISPs and ask them to block the websites. Everything is reactive. Nothing is proactive today.”

In March this year, major entertainment companies, including Netflix, Disney, Amazon Content Services, Warner Bros, also approached the Delhi High Court seeking a permanent injunction against platforms/websites hosting their copyrighted content.

What are the concerns around such a push?

Several digital rights groups, however, have pointed out that such overbroad legislation could lead to censorship. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in its blog, called such ideations the “new architectures of censorship” and highlighted the potential dark side of this: “Anyone with a copyright and the means to hire a lawyer could wield the hammer of site-blocking,” and that “blocking entire websites or groups of websites is imprecise, inevitably bringing down lawful speech along with whatever was targeted.”

In India too, we have been witnessing a peculiar use of copyright law. In September last year, we reported on how independent journalists with news channels on YouTube received copyright claims from Prasar Bharati (an Indian state-owned public broadcaster) for using sound bytes from India’s Prime Minister’s speeches. Ravish Kumar, a popular journalist in India who was targeted by such a claim, told MediaNama: “We’re alert about notices. But this is a big censorship issue to say that we cannot use the Prime Minister’s old bytes, his activities, his speech during G20, which are important things. This is a huge hindrance for us.”

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