In 2021, Germany joined a growing list of countries that have institutionalized pirate site blocking schemes in place.
Several large ISPs teamed up with copyright holders and launched the “Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet” (CUII), which is responsible for handing down blocking ‘orders’.
While CUII doesn’t rely on court judgments, there is some form of oversight. When copyright holders report a pirate site for consideration, a review committee first checks whether the domain is indeed linked to a website that structurally infringes copyrights.
What Sites are Blocked?
If a website overwhelmingly hosts or links to pirated material, the site can be nominated for a blocklist entry. This can apply to torrent sites, streaming portals, and direct download hubs, as long as piracy is front and center.
Germany does not publish an official overview of the domain names subject to blocking. While decisions are made public and often mention the target ‘site’ by name, domain names, URLs, and even the requesting rightsholders’ names, are all redacted.
Redacted versions of the blocking recommendations are published on the CUII portal and a few days ago, a new one was added to the growing list. While it doesn’t mention any specific domains the name of the site, TotalSportek, is repeatedly referenced.
TotalSportek Blocked
This new addition matches with fresh data from the third-party blocking transparency portal CUIIliste, which reports that totalsportek.pro and www.totalsportek.pro were blocked a few days ago. The same also applies to soccerstreams.football.
TotalSportek is a well-known pirate sports streaming service. The website has been blocked previously in France and Kenya, for example, and was reported to the US Trade Representative as a ‘notorious‘ piracy portal.
CUII concludes that the site is indeed “structurally infringing” so the blocking measures, requested by an unnamed sports rightsholder, are granted.
“The request for a recommendation to block the website TOTALSPORTEK is justified. The website is a structurally copyright infringing website (SUW). There is a clear violation of copyright. The blocking is reasonable and proportionate,” CUII writes.
The recommendation mentions that TotalSportek is not specifically targeted at a German audience. However, it does offer content that’s predominantly of interest to Germans, including German language streams.
Ticking the Boxes
Before a site can be blocked, rightsholders have to pursue other options to take the site offline. Here, the rightsholder hired a private investigator to contact the site directly and track down various intermediaries including the domain registrars and the hosting party, but without the desired result.
“The host provider was contacted via an email address in the period from ***** to ***** notified and on ***** from ***** received a legal warning. The notifications and the legal warning did not lead to an end to the violations by the SUW or the identification of its operators.
“Any further action against the host provider has no prospect of success. The company ***** identified as the host provider does not respond to warnings,” CUII adds.
Similar attempts to get information from TLS certificate providers, domain registrars, and a CDN service didn’t yield any results either.
Blocked Domains
According to the third-party CUIIListe site, whose reports are unverified, totalsportek.pro and soccerstreams.football are included in the new blocking round. That said, the recommendation may include more domain names, which have yet to be picked up by the monitoring site.
For example, CUII’s recommendation mention a ‘mirror’ and a ‘redirect’ domain. The redirect could be soccerstreams.football, which currently links to streameast.best. However, this StreamEast copy is not listed among the blocked domains itself.
If the blocking targets are clarified we will update this article accordingly. Overall, however, it’s clear that Germany intends to steadily expand its pirate site blocking efforts.
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A copy of CUII’s latest blocking recommendation is available here (pdf). Since 2021, the authority has issued 22 blocking orders, targeting hundreds of (sub)domains.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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