Under the Block BEARD Act, a copyright holder who finds infringing materials on a foreign website can ask a court to designate the online location a “foreign piracy site.” The court will then consider whether the copyright holder is harmed by the infringing material, as well as whether the site is “primarily designed” for infringing the material in question.If a court gives the website a “foreign piracy site” designation, copyright holders can petition the court to issue an order forcing ISPs to prevent users in the US from accessing it. It would also give site owners the opportunity to contest the order and “piracy site” designation.
Well aren't we just so excited to give the government all the tools for violating our rights? It seems to me that you could combine this idea quite nicely with age-verification laws and end up with a handy-dandy way of blocking US residents from visiting all kinds of websites we don't like (unless they use a VPN or tor, but I suspect it's not that hard for ISPs to interfere with your access to those as well).
Made me wonder if this is going on now. So, after a little research, I directed my browser to israel.tv and was redirected to the following page:
As a (kinda) private business, I realize that an ISP can probably refuse to let me connect to whatever sites it dislikes, but I'm particularly frustrated by these efforts that span ISPs and which come from courts. It seems like the sites that are mostly blocked in the US these days are torrent or streaming sites and the tooling comes from the DMCA. And in the time since that act was passed, we haven't expanded the censorship powers much, so maybe there's hope that the recent wave of age-verification laws won't get too expansive. Still sucks, though.