alt.hn

6/29/2026 at 4:07:15 PM

European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage

 https://torrentfreak.com/european-isps-want-rightsholders-held-accountable-for-overblocking-damage/

by Brajeshwar

6/29/2026 at 5:15:37 PM

It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.

Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always.

If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material.

Too much work? Tough...

by bradley13

6/29/2026 at 5:42:13 PM

Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?

If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.

I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.

by nonethewiser

6/29/2026 at 6:01:34 PM

Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though

by huijzer

6/29/2026 at 6:22:49 PM

>Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material.

Uhhh how about both? It is vital the material be taken down as well.

by nonethewiser

6/29/2026 at 6:28:47 PM

Sure, but let's prioritize catching actual criminals, right? Somehow US started completely ignoring the actual criminals and demanding platforms to play police and not try to punish the actual sources of lawbreaking.

by izacus

6/29/2026 at 6:00:02 PM

How do you know if something is child porn?

by qweqwe14

6/29/2026 at 6:12:53 PM

I dont think it matters for the point im making. Child porn exists and should be censored.

What are you suggesting?

by nonethewiser

6/29/2026 at 6:31:46 PM

I think the point they might be trying to make is that there are religious and socially conservative groups that intentionally misclassify anything even remotely related to LBTQ topics as “pornography” so that anti-pornography laws can be used to silence anyone and anything that opposes their regressive views on sexuality, as one example. So it is a line that must be tread carefully.

by nkrisc

6/29/2026 at 6:30:52 PM

It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"

by qweqwe14

6/29/2026 at 5:43:27 PM

soon with the age verification laws, the mass surveillance laws coming

we'll have a great wall of Europe ... my guess is that they're following the Russian / Chinese model.

banning of VPN is a matter of time.

then the days of free or anonymous internet is behind us.

by username_my1

6/29/2026 at 6:12:04 PM

> censorship is bad. Always.

Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?

What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...

Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?

If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?

Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?

by ButlerianJihad

6/29/2026 at 6:25:10 PM

Rick Santorum was a public figure, his name is fair game.

by axus

6/29/2026 at 6:37:39 PM

It only took 13 minutes for an account to bulls-eye exactly the incident I was referring to.

Sure, "fair game", whatever, how can you "censor" a grassroots parody/mockery like this? Part of the game was, it wasn't actually stoppable in any meaningful fashion.

It seems rude, unethical, puerile even, to do this name-calling and dragging through the mud, if you will, and it was perpetrated/spearheaded, so to speak, by a journalist whose morals and platform encouraged that sort of tactic.

I don't think "censorship" was a solution to that incident, and since Mr. Santorum was a politician then "fair game" is a meaningless circumscription.

But perhaps the whole episode should reflect more on the character of the originator, rather than the target?

by ButlerianJihad

6/29/2026 at 4:18:43 PM

Such an obvious thing, should have been there from day 1.

The situation in Spain is particularly crazy. How can la liga have this much power over the Internet?

by throwa356262

6/29/2026 at 4:26:37 PM

In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time.

Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I hated that

by gonzalohm

6/29/2026 at 4:52:34 PM

> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null

by greenavocado

6/29/2026 at 5:50:01 PM

Those are my thoughts too. I believe there was a world cup or euro cup during the 2008 crisis, which Spain suffered specially badly. All countries were getting out of the "hole" except Spain, but hey we won the euro cup so suddenly our country was the best and everyone forgot about it

by gonzalohm

6/29/2026 at 4:44:34 PM

... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)

by dummydummy1234

6/29/2026 at 5:46:57 PM

It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time.

The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport

by gonzalohm

6/29/2026 at 6:08:56 PM

Bit of a catch 22 isn't it?

Soccer is the only important sport so it gets all of the attention

Soccer gets all of the attention so it stays the only important sport

by bluefirebrand

6/29/2026 at 5:15:04 PM

Sometimes places close streets for traffic control.

The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.

A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.

by forgotaccount3

6/29/2026 at 4:55:55 PM

> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".

by FireBeyond

6/29/2026 at 6:28:45 PM

That’s crazy, in the Netherlands (though about 16x smaller than Texas) the 10 biggest stadiums in the country are Football (soccer) stadiums ranging from 10400 capacity at #10 to about 56000 capacity for the #1 stadium (build for 130 million euro). All at the highest paid level of professional football.

30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!

by stwr

6/29/2026 at 6:05:11 PM

To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team

That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth*

College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses.

* There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth

by iso1631

6/29/2026 at 4:45:30 PM

It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible...

We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.

by gadrev

6/29/2026 at 5:04:54 PM

I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad.

We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.

by riffraff

6/29/2026 at 6:37:31 PM

Agreed

Enforcement should be a cost/benefit analysis.

RN, there is very little cost imposed on the alleged rightsholders, so they spam freely.

by mring33621

6/29/2026 at 5:58:56 PM

It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.

But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.

by throwawayffffas

6/29/2026 at 6:11:02 PM

>they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.

Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff.

The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin.

Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed.

The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this

by btasker

6/29/2026 at 5:03:07 PM

The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers...

The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation.

by londons_explore

6/29/2026 at 6:12:56 PM

Absolutely.

No such power without consequences if abused.

Put some skin in the game

by croes

6/29/2026 at 5:46:54 PM

I hope so, in Spain you can't access anything that uses Cloudflare, even docker images, thanks to LaLiga's president bullshit

by expo98