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The South African government plans to crack down on illegal file sharing and streaming websites in South Africa.
Speaking to Parliament’s Communications Portfolio Committee, the Department of Digital Communications and Technologies (DCDT) said ISPs should be required to cooperate with the government to combat online piracy.
A new proposal that is part of the Draft White Paper on the Policy Framework for Audiovisual and Audio Content Services calls for current laws to be amended to this effect.
While the whitepaper proposes legislative amendments to tackle piracy in general, the DCDT’s chief broadcasting policy director, Collin Mashile, has specifically named illegal file-sharing websites and streaming platforms as the ones. main culprits.
“The draft white paper proposes that the legislation impose requirements on ISPs to cooperate with rights holders and the government to police illegal file sharing or streaming websites,” Mashile said.
“Piracy is bad for the industry, it is a global problem, and with the rise of the Internet, it has become a very bad problem.”
“Most of this is currently online, and ISPs are governed by the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (ECTA),” he added.
For this reason, the ECTA should be amended to require the collaboration of ISPs to close or block access to hacked websites, he said, citing the prevalence of such associations in other countries.
He also said that government departments must cooperate to ensure that anti-piracy measures are effective and to target those who try to circumvent government anti-piracy measures.
“This is one of the key proposals that we are making and it has to be effective against people who are involved in pirating South African content,” Mashile said.
“Around the world, a lot of people are starting to be prosecuted and various websites are shutting down.”
ISPs that monitor traffic
Currently, the ECTA states that ISPs cannot have an obligation to control the traffic of their subscribers.
However the recent draft law on cybercrime It imposes an obligation on ISPs to report cases of piracy and retain any information related to the incident that may be useful to the authorities.
This means that the provision that protects ISPs from monitoring South African consumer traffic must be removed in order for the proposed crackdown on piracy to be carried out efficiently.
The Internet Service Providers Association of South Africa (ISPA) has highlighted this conflict, stating that the Cyber Crimes Bill cannot be construed to mean that ISPs are required to monitor or share customers’ internet traffic. .
“ISPA does not believe that this is a correct interpretation of the bill in its current form,” the previously counted organization MyBroadband.
“Rather, it is an explicit provision of the Electronic Communications Act that ISPs do not have a general obligation to monitor electronic communications transmitted or stored on their networks, and they may be liable for a crime if they do so,” the organization argued. “
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