Piracy has been a major problem for artists around the world, and they have been fighting hard for this to minimize if not stopped. Hollywood houses thousands of artists, and its MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is asking all hosting providers to take a more serious action on this issue.
According to Torrent Freak, Hollywood's MPAA asked the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), Vishal Amin to tighten its security against piracy as it has been a grave matter despite the progress that the providers did in the recent years. "Compounding matters is the lack of accountability of some major online platforms for their failure to prevent content theft and other illicit conduct over their services," the MPAA's Senior Vice President Neil Fried wrote.
The MPAA said that the payment services and advertisers have voluntarily agreed to block all referral traffic from different pirate sites, but of course, this is insufficient to fight piracy. The other platforms and intermediaries must also do the same, including hosting providers as they can shut down pirate sites.
However, MPAA said that many of these hosting providers declined to do it - something that the government should do something to help the online ecosystem become healthier. It also requested the hosting providers to use automated piracy filters on their servers, notify users about it, terminate repeat offenders, and prevent them from registering again on the site.
Many of these pirate sites are clear of blatant violation of terms of service, which needs to stop. MPAA also added that hosts should be stricter on the high volume of traffic, which is more suspicious, and might be infringing.
Thus, they should ban the referral traffic from pirate sites totally. MPAA wants these providers to "implement download bandwidth or frequency limitations to prevent high volume traffic for particular files" in an attempt to "remove files expeditiously" as well as "block referral traffic from known piracy sites."
Hollywood's MPAA hopes that IPEC would not stop in taking further actions on this piracy issue and to encourage these hosting providers to voluntarily block all referral traffic from the pirate sites although others might suggest that this violates free expression. However, MPAA explained that restricting all illegal activities promotes free expression instead, as it establishes a safe and healthy environment.
Additionally, if there is a safer online ecosystem, users can interact comfortably without any restriction rather than committing highly unlawful content that will destroy all artists in the entertainment industry.
