High Court Forces Big UK Broadband ISPs to Block 13 More Piracy Sites

[Dark Vader]

The Motion Picture Association of Europe (MPA) has once again convinced the High Court to force all of the United Kingdom’s largest broadband ISPs to block access to 13 extra websites, which were all found to facilitate Internet copyright infringement (piracy).

As usual the MPA first attempted make a voluntarily request for BT, Virgin Media, O2, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and EE to block the sites, which is traditionally refused because ISPs won’t impose such a block without legal grounds to do so.

Failing that they launched an injunction against the providers, which succeeded in harnessing Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) in order to force the ISPs into imposing a court ordered block.

The latest list includes a number of popular, albeit unlawful, video streaming websites (plus any mirrors or proxies of the same site that may be created in the future). The blocks are likely to be introduced over the next few weeks.

The 13 New Website Blocks

123movies
Geektv
Genvideos
Gowatchseries
Hdmovies14
Hdmovieswatch
Themovie4u
Moviesub
Movietubenow
Series-cravings
Spacemov
Streamallthis
Watchmovies

So far well over 100 websites have been blocked by this approach and that’s not even counting the many proxies or mirrors that frequently crop up. But blocking like this isn’t cheap and Wiggin LLP last year revealed that an unopposed application tends to cost around £14,000 per site. On top of that the additional admin required to maintain the block and keep ISPs up-to-date with related IP changes and new URLs (Proxy Servers) comes to around £3,600 per site per year.

At the same time ISPs also incur on-going costs as part of their work to introduce the blocks. EE previously suggested that a “near four figure sum” was involved with each update, while Sky hinted at a “mid three figure sum” and then roughly half that for future updates. Similarly Virgin Media pegged their own annual costs at a “low five figure sum“.

Meanwhile those looking to access such sites can easily circumvent the restrictions by using all sorts of different approaches, such as DNS changes, HTTPS, Proxy Servers or Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections etc.