Piracy Shield Blacks Out Tech News Site by Blocking Another CDN IP

Italy's Piracy Shield IPTV blocking system is back in the news today after yet another completely avoidable blocking blunder. On Monday night, yet another CDN IP address was added to the blocklist rendering innocent sites unavailable. Italian tech news site DDaY, a long-standing critic of Piracy Shield's indiscriminate blocking, was among those affected.

 After a series of completely avoidable incidents that have seen countless innocent sites blocked by Italy’s Piracy Shield blocking system, at this point is it appropriate to keep calling them ‘blunders’?

Continuing to do so might suggest acceptance that incompetence is always to blame. In reality, recent legal amendments addressed the issue of overblocking by dramatically weakening what little protection innocent sites had against becoming collateral damage.

In practical terms, rightsholders can now knowingly block innocent sites in many circumstances, with the full support of Italian law.

Piracy Shield Blocks Another CDN IP Address

In what appears to have been an attempt to prevent people from watching pirate streams of Serie A match Monza vs Udinese, a blocking ticket was filed last night at 21:19 targeting the IP address 84.17.59.117.

The ‘winning’ ticket (credit: Matteo Contrini)

It is beyond trivial to determine who operates that IP address, it takes less than seconds to check.

Even those with rudimentary experience and knowledge of leading providers should’ve suspected that blocking was likely to lead to collateral damage.

Targeting an IP address operated by CDN provider Datacamp and by extension BunnyCDN was almost certainly likely to lead to overblocking. Here, however, the nature of the network means an accurate assessment of how far the collateral damage might extend would not have been possible; whichever rightsholder filed the ticket, decided to block it anyway.

Blocking Hit Tech News Site DDaY.it

In the early hours of Tuesday, Italian tech news site DDaY.it revealed that the blocking of 84.17.59.117 had disrupted its ability to operate. DDaY explained that the IP address is used by the CDN service that keeps its site online and by blocking it, readers were facing timeouts and other issues.

As shown in the short clip below posted to X.com, some visitors to DDaY were redirected to a page operated by telecoms regulator AGCOM which explained the blocking by effectively branding DDaY a pirate site.

Confermo… pic.twitter.com/TGGMkwyxtz

 

— Andrea Mennillo (@handymenny) December 9, 2024

“It happens that the good guys, in order to play the good guys with martial conviction (hey, they are the good guys…), by slinging a flamethrower called Piracy Shield, end up becoming the bad guys. And “fin di bene” [greater good] cannot suffice to justify so-called collateral damage,” the news platform reported in a response this morning.

“Obviously DDAY is not the target of the block ordered by Piracy Shield and the blocked IP address is not even the main one of our site. But evidently our CDN provider has a load balancing management system that makes sure that some sessions are directed to the blocked IP, thus leading to the connection errors.”

DDay is a Long-Time Critic of Piracy Shield

As a long-time critic of the Piracy Shield system, DDaY finds itself in an inconvenient position. In Italy, opponents of Piracy Shield are often portrayed as siding with pirates, which the publication certainly does not. That the site’s voice has been silenced by the same mechanisms it has been calling out since its launch earlier this year, is not a great look.

The publication says that the IP address has now been removed from the blocklist but once again, the big question of why it was added in the first place will go unanswered. DDaY would like an apology, but history shows us they probably shouldn’t hold their breath.

“The fact that (perhaps) the reported pirate site was also blocked, cannot console us for the fact that we were hit by the provision, probably together with many other innocent sites. By doing so, those who operate under the flag of good to stop piracy, end up behaving like those pirates who dedicate themselves to taking down other people’s sites.”

Source

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