Danish Pirate Site Blocking Updated, Telecoms Group Publishes All Domains

Rights Alliance and ISPs have agreed to update their code of conduct to block pirate sites more quickly in Denmark. When one ISP receives an instruction to block a domain, a new process will see other ISPs follow in less than seven days. Meanwhile, Denmark's Telecommunications Industry Association is publishing files that reveal precisely which domains are being blocked. TorrentFreak reports: Both Rights Alliance and Teleindustrien (Telecommunications Industry Association in Denmark) have published copies of the new Code of Conduct but neither explain how the new system will work. Indeed, the CoC contains a paragraph that explains that a section detailing the individual steps, procedures and criteria, has been withheld "in order to achieve the purpose of the agreement." Given that Denmark's blocking program is DNS-based, it's trivial for ISPs to modify local DNS entries to redirect pirate site visitors to Share With Care (SWC), a portal designed to encourage pirates back on to the legal path of authorized content services. Somewhat intrigued by the apparent need for secrecy, we took a closer look at Teleindustrien and to our surprise, found the complete opposite.

It appears that when ISPs are ordered to block domains for any reason, Teleindustrien goes public with three things: the laws under which the blocking was ordered, who ordered the blocking, and which domains were blocked in response. For example, the telecoms industry group details recent blocks associated with the Ukraine conflict (including RT.com and sputniknews.com) and publishes the domains to an easily downloadable .csv file -- perfect for ISPs looking to implement DNS blocking. Another .csv file is published for gambling site domains deemed illegal in Denmark, 183 according to the latest batch.

The data relating to Denmark's pirate site blocking program reveals how quickly it has expanded over the years. In 2017, Danish ISPs were blocking around 100 pirate sites, a figure that jumped to 478 in 2020. The latest .csv file containing the list of blocked piracy domains is dated September 27, 2022. It contains 892 URLs -- some of them domains in their own right and others representing sub-domains on various sites dedicated to unblocking. It's unclear how the new streamlining provisions in the revised Code of Conduct can beat pulling a plain text file from a website but Teleindustrian also provides the data in PDF format (PDF) for the Adobe fans out there.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.