Justice will soon be able to block pirate sites more effectively

[Chewy_fox]

An amendment to the bill consolidating respect for the principles of the Republic (formerly the Law against separatism) proposes to allow judges to impose decisions to block sites on all necessary intermediaries. An improvement because until now the blocking of sites relies mainly on hosts and ISPs – it can generally be easily bypassed by changing DNS or using a VPN.

Credit: Unsplash

Justice will soon benefit from more extensive powers to block websites in France, whether they are pirate sites promoting terrorism, or other sites liable to be targeted by a blocking procedure. Adopted on April 2, 2021, an amendment to the Bill consolidating respect for the principles of the Republic modifies the Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy (LCEN) to allow judges to impose site blocking decisions on any actor involved in making the site available on the internet.

The amendment presented by the government states in its reasons: “In the current state of the law, the summary proceedings available to 8 of I of Article 6 of the Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy (LCEN) no longer make it possible to respond effectively to requests for the closure of sites. To remedy this, it is necessary to broaden the scope of the actors targeted by this procedure and to modernize the procedural remedies it prescribes “. Until then, court decisions ordering the blocking of websites were mainly imposed on ISPs and hosts based in France..

Judges will be able to force more players to block websites

However, many pirate sites operate from abroad. It is therefore generally easy to bypass the blocking, whether by modifying the DNS addresses of the machine or by using a VPN service that directly connects the Internet user to the network from another point in the world most often located abroad. . And that should not go smoothly. The reasons for the text speak in particular of the emergence of the DNS over HTTPS protocol, a new protocol which secures DNS queries (DNS blocking of sites is one of the measures applied in the event of administrative blocking).

By making the connection more secure, the protocol scrambles the tracks, and implies that a judge will have to give formal notice to new actors if he wants his decisions to be implemented. “It is therefore necessary to widen the scope of the actors covered by the current 8 of I of article 6 of the LCEN to all the actors having the possibility of taking measures to prevent or put an end to the damage caused. by the content of a service, such as for example the blocking of a website or the removal of content ”, continues the text.

Henceforth, thus, “Any susceptible person” contributing to the blocking of a mirror site may be involved in a blocking decision, and no longer members of a restricted list provided for by law. In addition to this increased number of actors, the amendment proposes changes to speed up the procedure, and do not give mirror sites time to multiply. The amendment provides for “Replace the summary proceedings and request of the LCEN by the accelerated procedure on the merits provided for by the new article 481-1 of the code of civil procedure (CPC)”.

And to specify: “This adversarial procedure allows the parties to obtain a decision on the merits, and not a provisional one, unlike the current procedural arrangements – this modification allows a more appropriate response to be provided to the parties while guaranteeing their legal certainty, since site blocking decisions will thus be final and no longer provisional as is currently the case“. The defense will still be able to appeal, but the blocking can still be applied immediately on a temporary basis.

We therefore understand that this modification will strengthen the arsenal available to judges, but also that the latter will have increasing power to block websites in France more effectively for various and varied reasons. France quite frequently uses decisions to block websites. Precise figures are not available, but in 2016 for example (year or figures are available) 312 requests to block entire sites were filed, including 244 for child pornography content and 68 for content promoting terrorism. 1,439 content removal requests were also filed (mainly for terrorism), accompanied by more than 855 delisting requests.

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