Norway’s Parliament Determined To Fight Against Online Piracy; Website Blocking, A Solution?!

[Guest Ethan]

Norway’s Parliament Determined To Fight Against Online Piracy; Website Blocking, A Solution?!

While The Pirate Bay moves its ship from one domain name to the other (read an updated report here), Norway cooks a plan to put the notorious website (and all services alike) to an early grave. Modifications to Norway’s Copyright Act suggest website blocking, while allowing rightsholders to spy and pursue file-sharers. This week, the proposed amendments received a green thumb from the country’s parliament.

Norway’s stance on file-sharing has been put under pressure starting with 2009, when the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and some of the country’s movie studios asked Telenor (Norway’s biggest internet service provider) to block access to The Pirate Bay. The ISP refused, saying that there’s no legal basis for such an action. As such, a lawsuit followed, and the court’s ruling favored Telenor. The next year, specifically in February 2010, an appeal was filed by a rightsholder. This second attempt was also rejected.

Obviously, a change in the Copyright Law was needed, so in May 2011 the Ministry of Culture made public the new proposals. This Monday, the country’s parliament reviewed the proposed amendments; the Labor Progress Party, Socialist Left Party, Christian Democrats, and Conservatives voted “yes” on the bill. The only “no” came from the opposition.

The amendments aim to pin-point and prosecute not just those who facilitate copyright infringement, but also those who share copyrighted content without consent from rightsholders. As such, a rightsholder can force internet service providers to “prevent or impede access” to websites that have “extensively made available material that clearly violates copyrights.”

As far as those who run “rogue” websites are concerned, the amendments state that if the owner is unknown or has an undisclosed address “…the case can be decided without the person concerned being given an opportunity to comment.”

End-users will face the full extent of the modified Copyright Act (if the amendments pass) with no regard for Norway’s data protection laws.

“If it is likely that copyright or other rights under this law have been violated, the court may, notwithstanding the confidentiality provided by the Electronic Communications Act, at the request of the licensee, require a provider of electronic communications to disclose information that identifies the owner of the subscription used for the violation,” the modifications read.

“In order that the petition should be granted, the court must find that the arguments in favor of disclosure outweighs the interest of confidentiality. In assessing the court shall weigh the interests of the subscriber against the licensee’s interest in gaining access to the information taking into account severity, scope and effects of the violation.”

According to Jens Christian Koller of the Parliamentary Information Service, the amendments are still to pass a second review of the parliament before formal adoption.

“In practice therefore these amendments to the Copyright Act have been adopted, but it is still not correct to say that it has already been formally adopted by the Parliament. What you can say is that it is now very difficult to stop this law,”