Lawmakers have introduced a new bill aimed at combating “foreign pirate sites,” as previously reported by TorrentFreak. The bill, called the Block BEARD Act, will allow copyright holders to ask federal courts to block pirate websites.
The bipartisan bill, initiated by Senators Tom Tillis (Republican from North Carolina), Chris Coon (Democrat from Delaware), Marsha Blackburn (Republican from Tennessee), and Adam Schiff (Democrat from California), is the latest attempt to combat digital piracy in the United States. Earlier this year, in January, Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), which would similarly require internet service providers to block foreign pirate websites.
Under the BIRDA Act, a copyright owner who discovers copyright-infringing material on a foreign website may apply to the court to have that website designated as a “foreign pirate site.” The court will consider whether the copyright owner has suffered damage from the copyright-infringing materials and whether the site is “primarily intended” to infringe the copyrights of the relevant materials.
If the court finds that a website is a “foreign pirate site,” copyright owners can ask the court to issue an order requiring Internet service providers to block users in the United States from accessing that site. This will also give the site owners an opportunity to challenge the order and the designation of the site as a “pirate site.”
More than ten years ago, attempts to block pirate sites in the US were met with protests in the form of internet shutdowns in protest against the proposed laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said earlier this year that website blocking laws are “dangerous, unnecessary, and ineffective” because restricting access to one site could potentially harm thousands of others that use the same cloud infrastructure host or IP address. The EFF also notes that blocking websites is “very easy to circumvent” because “determined violators can create the same content on a new domain in a matter of hours,” and users can use a virtual private network (VPN) to regain access.
Despite this, Schiff claims that the Block BEARD Act will “protect both creators and consumers from foreign criminal groups seeking to steal our intellectual property and exploit Americans.”
