<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/14/research-italys-piracy-shield-is-just-as-big-a-disaster-as-everyone-predicted/>
"
Walled Culture first wrote about Piracy Shield, Italy’s automated system for
tackling alleged copyright infringement in the streaming sector, two years ago.
Since then, we have written about the serious problems that soon emerged. But
instead of fixing those issues, the government body that runs the scheme,
Italy’s AGCOM (the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees), has
extended it. The problems may be evident, but they have not been systematically
studied, until now: a peer-reviewed study from a group of (mostly Italian)
researchers has just been published as a preprint (found via
TorrentFreak).
It’s particularly welcome as perhaps the first rigorous analysis of Piracy
Shield and its flaws.
The paper begins with a good introduction to the general area of IP and DNS
blocking, also discussed in
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions
available), before detailing the history of Piracy Shield. As the paper notes,
one of the major concerns about the system is the lack of transparency: AGCOM
does not publish a list of IP addresses or domain names that are subject to its
blocking. That not only makes it extremely difficult to correct mistakes, it
also – conveniently – hides those mistakes, as well as the scope and impact of
Piracy Shield. To get around this lack of transparency, the researchers had to
resort to a dataset leaked on GitHub, which contained 10,918 IPv4 addresses and
42,664 domain names (more precisely, the latter were “fully qualified domain
names” – FQDN) that had been blocked. As good academics, the researchers
naturally verified the dataset as best they could:
While this dataset may not be exhaustive … it nonetheless provides a
conservative lower-bound estimate of the platform’s blocking activity, which
serves as the foundation for the subsequent analyses.
Much of the paper is devoted to the detailed methodology. One important result
is that many of the blocked IP addresses belonged to leased IP address space.
As the researchers explain:
This suggests that illegal streamers may attempt to exploit leased address
space more intensively, even if just indirectly, by obtaining them by
hosting companies that leases them, leading to more potential collateral
damages for new lessees.
This particular collateral damage arises from the fact that even after the
leased IP address is released by those who are using it for allegedly
unauthorized streaming, it is still blocked on the Piracy Shield system. That
means whoever is allocated that leased IP address subsequently is blocked by
AGCOM, but are probably unaware of that fact, because of the opaque nature of
the blocking process. More generally, collateral damage arose from the wrongful
blocking of a wide range of completely legitimate sites:
During our classification process, we observed a wide range of website types
across these collaterally affected domains, including personal branding
pages, company profiles, and websites for hotels and restaurants. One
notable case involves 19 Albanian websites hosted on a single IP address
assigned to WIIT Cloud. These sites are still unreachable from Italy."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
