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Business News Digital Legal
Number of UK web-blocks passes 100
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 26 March 2015
Bored of the endless ‘this many billion downloads’ and ‘this many billion streams’ stats? Well, here’s another fun digital landmark for you, the UK entertainment industry has now blocked more than one hundred websites on copyright infringement grounds. Well done one and all. Let’s have a big fat block party. Maybe with Bloc Party headlining.
So yes, Torrentfreak, which keeps count of such things, has noted that a recent injunction sought by record label trade group BPI and the groovy guys over at record industry rights body PPL, which forced internet service providers to block access to seventeen unlicensed download sites, took the total number of blocked sites to 110.
As so much previously reported I now spout this shit in my sleep, web-blocking has become a favoured anti-piracy method of the music industry in those countries where new legislation or legal precedent has enabled such a thing. Once a court has deemed a website to be liable for copyright infringement (or, more often, so called ‘authorising infringement’), an injunction is issued ordered ISPs to stop their customers from accessing it.
Of course, piracy sites have a habit of moving location, while piracy fans like to set up proxies to help their brethren circumvent the blockades. And then Google, a firm which has, let us never forget, “done more than almost any other company to help tackle online piracy”, helps everyone find the new locations or latest proxies, so that no one is actually deprived of their free speech rights, aka free Megan Trainor tracks for all.
But the movie studios and record labels reckon that the web-blocks do reduce the number of more casual web-surfers accessing illegal sources of content, or at least they make it clearer to everyone that this website or that ain’t legit. And so the blocks continue.
Most of the seventeen set-ups to have been blocked in the latest injunction are unlicensed MP3 download sites, though it did also include a site that enables people to find music and movies of Mega, the newer of the cloud hosting services set up by MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom.
If you’re interested, Torrentfreak has a full list of all the sites now blocked.
