UK News: Bt to block sites

[DVTimes]

BT will have to pay only a few thousand pounds to block web portals found to infringe copyright and promote piracy, the High Court has ruled, in spite of campaigners? claims that the cost of blocking sites could force broadband bills to rise.

Justice Arnold said on Wednesday that BT must block Newzbin2, a site containing links to unlicensed content such as The King?s Speech, within 14 days, after a legal challenge by film studios including Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. The telecoms group is also required to pay the lion?s share of both sides? legal costs for fighting the case, likely to be a six-figure sum, and the costs of implementing the block.




When Justice Arnold made his initial ruling in July, it was hailed as setting a precedent that internet service providers must block copyright-infringing websites if rights holders obtained a court injunction, having exhausted other ways to take down an offending site.

Lord Puttnam, president of the Film Distributors? Association, said: ?This is a very significant day for the UK?s creative industries. The law is clear. Industrial online piracy is illegal and can be stopped.?

BT said: ?It is helpful to have the order now and the clarity that it brings.?

BT already runs a website filtering service called Cleanfeed. It is updated frequently with a list of sites from the Internet Watch Foundation, to prevent its customers from viewing child sexual abuse content online.

BT has estimated that it will cost around £5,000 to adapt Cleanfeed to enable updates from other sources, such as the Motion Picture Association, and then £100 for each further domain name or numerical internet address.

Justice Arnold said that paying these costs was ?modest and proportionate? in this instance, although he said in future rights holders could have to bear more of the costs. The cost equates to fractions of a penny a month for each of BT?s broadband customers, and future cases are unlikely to be challenged by ISPs, meaning much lower legal costs.

Rights holder groups have suggested they may target dozens more piracy sites.

As recently as August, Consumer Focus had argued that blocking sites would be ?expensive? for ISPs and ?the costs would be likely to mean higher bills for customers?.

Consumer Focus was unable to provide figures to support this claim, although the group warned that costs could rise if there were a large number of subsequent cases against ISPs. Most large ISPs, including Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky and O2, use technology similar to Cleanfeed for their home broadband customers.

?Blocking websites like Newzbin2 is a sticking plaster in terms of dealing with copyright infringement,? Mike O?Connor, chief executive of Consumer Focus said. ?Instead of just playing whack-a-mole with website blocking, the industry needs to focus their energies on coming up with an integrated strategy on how to move customers from illegal to legal services.?

Simon Baggs, partner at Wiggin, the law firm that worked for the studios on the Newzbin case, said he believed that there would be appetite for more requests from content owners for injunctions to block sites that they have been unable to take down because they operate overseas, outside British jurisdiction.

?The judgement has laid out a roadmap for how to do this in a way that is cost effective,? he said. ?You shouldn?t get the same level of costs in the future because you?d expect that ISPs would not challenge in the same way.?

MPA said it was in discussion with other ISPs about blocking Newzbin2 and hoped that they would comply with the ruling without the need for a new judicial process.


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/240b1e54-f...#axzz1bv0zNk1N

[DVTimes]

Britain’s largest ISP, BT Group Plc, is being forced to use porn-blocking filtering to stop users from accessing a website promoting movie piracy.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported that as a result of a case won by News Corp’s Twentieth Century Fox and five other studios last July, a U.K. judge told BT that it had to use the Cleanfeed content-blocking system to block Newzbin — a website that allegedly promotes online piracy.

London-based Cleanfeed is currently being used to bar access to child porn websites in the U.K. and other countries.

This was the first ruling of its kind and may open the doors forcing other ISPs to follow.

According to the report, in March 2010, Fox persuaded a U.K. court that Newzbin infringed its copyrights at which time the website went into liquidation to avoid damages. It then resurfaced with more than 700,000 members as “Newzbin 2.”

Fox claimed that BT and other ISPs must block the site to prevent infringement, while BT argued a court order would be inappropriate because it isn’t a customer of the company.

Fox, Universal Studios, Warner Bros., Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and Sony Corp.’s Columbia Pictures received support from the Motion Picture Association of America in the case.

“Copyright owners can take a great deal of comfort from today’s decision,” said Simon Baggs, a lawyer who represented the MPAA in last year’s case. “The court has conclusively recognized the critical role that ISPs can be required to play in preventing infringement of copyright.”

A Newzbin2 “casual editor” claimed that the website is now more legitimate and Napster-like containing more non-infringing material, however the court refused the plea.

http://www.xbiz.com/news/140070