Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

The Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) is a private group formed by ISPs and copyright holders. They decided what websites to block, and ISPs followed, without any court ruling. No judge was involved, no legal process.

The members: The four largest ISPs in Germany and a bunch of copyright holders (the Motion Picture Association, Sky, ...). If they decided that a site should be blocked, the ISPs just blocked the domains from being resolved. This ran completely outside the courts, a private system made by corporations for censorship. Blocked sites included streaming services, but also sites like Sci-Hub or game piracy sites.

In a previous blog post, I went into detail on how we trolled them:

• We leaked their secret blocklists (the list of domains was kept secret!)
• We exposed dozens of wrongful and outdated blocks.
• We made them unblock a lot of domains, including some that were blocked for years.
• ... and so much more. We just made a lot of bad press for them.

The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."

...

Just WTF, how could that be legal?

That seems almost more important than the original post

Lina is the goat

This blog was classified as "parked" by Palo Alto urlfiltering service.

I just reported is a personal website about computer and cybersecurity.