Date: 

Friday, May 24, 2013 - 09:45

Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Office has announced plans to block sites that encourage copyright infringement online. Explicitly citing the introduction of similar systems in the UK and Indonesia, the Director of the IPO hopes that the proposal will pass into law later this year after a series of public hearings.

The IPO describes a system of restricting access to sites based on their domains and IP addresses that is focused on sites that are in 'flagrant violation' of copyright law. The working definition appears to be a site or service that is "engaged exclusively in copyright infringement" or where the majority of content is infringing. The IPO is mulling some kind of judicial review to examine sites for which blocking is proposed.

While the IPO is aware that any blocking system is prone to circumvention techniques, the proposal believes that blocking will have a negative effect on visits to affected sites. Scrutiny analysis of the effect of ThePirateBay block in the UK demonstrated this - while myriad proxies existed to route around ISP blocking of ThePirateBay in the country, visitors to the site still fell significantly in the six month period after the blocking was introduced by the six major ISPs.

In Taiwan, additional proposals are also being considered that would require Taiwanese ISPs to warn their customers about the dangers of visiting such sites, including the risk of viruses. It is not clear whether this legislation would involve a one off warning being sent to all an ISP’s customers, or if it would take the form of an injection into the browser sessions of those visiting piracy related sites.

The proposed introduction of site blocking into Taiwan measures comes amid the introduction of a further court-order on behalf of the MPA in the UK blocking access via the country’s major ISPs to streaming video site Movie2k.to and link blog dl4all.com.