European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage

Scope of the Problem: Overblocking & Sports Piracy

• Many comments focus on Spain, where anti-piracy measures around soccer reportedly cause broad outages (e.g., Cloudflare-hosted services, even Docker images, intermittently failing during high-profile matches).
• Italy is described as similarly influenced by top-tier soccer leagues and rights holders; some link this to entrenched interests and even organized crime.
• Several see this as symptomatic of governments prioritizing sports revenues and public spectacle over basic connectivity and other public needs.

Censorship, DMCA, and Liability

• Multiple commenters note parallels with the U.S. DMCA: platforms face no real liability for taking down lawful content, and “penalty of perjury” is seen as mostly toothless.
• There is support for making rightsholders financially liable for wrongful blocks to create counter-incentives against spammy or overly broad takedowns.
• Others warn that requiring court judgments before any action would make enforcement prohibitively slow and expensive, favoring wealthy litigants.

Is Censorship Ever Justified?

• One strand rejects “censorship is always bad” as too absolute, citing child sexual abuse material, revenge porn, doxxing, and serious threats as content most people agree should be suppressed.
• Others stress difficulty of correct classification, risk of overblocking (e.g., mislabeling LGBTQ content as pornography), and the tendency of censorship tools to be repurposed for political control.
• There is debate over whether resources should prioritize catching creators of harmful material versus widespread takedowns; some argue these goals compete for limited enforcement budgets.

Cloudflare, ISPs, and Technical/Policy Responses

• Cloudflare is defended for not “policing” customers too aggressively; doing so is seen as a slippery slope and technically costly, though critics say it could at least segregate obvious piracy sites by IP.
• Examples from the UK show how once a blocking system exists (e.g., for child abuse material), courts and rightsholders quickly repurpose it for copyright enforcement.
• Some ISPs deliberately avoid censorship infrastructure to avoid being drafted into enforcement; others comply under court order and face user backlash.

Proposed Reforms & Broader Concerns

• Suggestions include: small per-claim fees, automatic penalties or damages for invalid takedowns, and keeping content up during disputes in non-urgent cases.
• Several commenters see a global trend toward heavier internet control (age verification, surveillance, “great firewalls”) and worry about the loss of an open, anonymous internet.