Solar Movie is the content industry’s first site blocking target

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blog The Federal Government passed its controversial new law to block websites which infringe copyright in June last year, but it it has taken until now for the content industry to actually organise lawsuits to start using the laws. Funny that things have taken so long … given the apparent urgency with which the laws were passed at the time. As revealed by the Sydney Morning Herald and a number of other media this morning, the content industry’s first target will be Solar Movie. I’ve never heard of this site (and I won’t link to it), but apparently it allows you to watch “free movies online”. The SMH reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“The site has been blocked by court order in the United Kingdom and on Tuesday was the first site to be blocked through court action by Singapore ISPs since the its government’s own copyright legislation changes in December 2014.”

To be honest, I can’t see this site blocking action having a huge impact on Internet piracy in Australia. Not only can you defeat this style of site blocking merely by using a Virtual Private Network (not precisely hard to implement), but I would imagine that much of the actual piracy that takes place in Australia is using the BitTorrent protocol. In any case, we’re sure to see some legal action on this shortly.

Image credit: Capcom/Nintendo (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video game)

13 COMMENTS

  1. I have paid for season 9 of Big Bang theory with a season pass and these thieves are not releasing the 10 episodes that have been aired in the USA.

    Release your content to people who have paid to watch it you are punishing people who pay for content then complain when someone download it.

    Get your act together!

  2. Interesting that they haven’t gone after The Pirate Bay first — suspect this is being used as a test case to iron out the ‘bugs’ in their arguments, before going after the ‘big players’.

  3. Neil Gane and Graham Burke… both stooges propped up with a lot of undeserved cash but also having no real understanding of market dynamics. Gone are the days where the distributors have total control of their digital media and this pathetic last ditch attempt to protect a redundant cartel like behaviour is futile and certainly know it even if they don’t show it. Market behaviour suggests on-demand and at a reasonable price will win over expensive litigations every time. Or would you like iinet to remind you again of the limitations of your influence?

  4. Whats a waste of time and money…they know what they need to do, they just can’t let go of the dieing models…

    Oh, and welcome to innovation Malcolm ;o)

  5. Not only can you defeat this style of site blocking merely by using a Virtual Private Network

    It’s my understanding that simply using a non-ISP DNS service will bypass these blocks, can anyone confirm?

    • I believe those services will work but they are easy for the site to detect and don’t fall in to the “private” category which means what you do is open to those who wish to look.

    • Depends on how well they are actually done.

      Was in Bali a couple of weeks ago and Indonesia’s main telco have a block Netflix (on the direction of the government). Simple DNS redirects didn’t work like using Google DNS or one of the unblock netflix services (which use DNS to direct your netflix connection through their service). Don’t think it would have stop an actually VPN service but I wasn’t going to much trouble to watch a couple of hours of netflix while on holidays.

  6. Good to hear the media content copyright holders are promoting the techie VPN providers.
    That’s called cross sector technical innovation I think. :P

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