Business News Digital Legal Top Stories

BPI secures more file-sharing site blocks

By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 30 October 2013

Record industry trade body the BPI has secured a new court order forcing UK ISPs to block a further 21 file-sharing websites, in addition to those already deemed liable for copyright infringement by the English courts. The blocks must be enacted today.

As previously reported, numerous file-sharing sites have already been added to the UK internet blacklist, starting with The Pirate Bay last year – the torrent site later claiming that this had caused little noticeable impact on its traffic, thanks to the ease with which the blocks can be circumvented. The BPI, on the other hand, says that the blocks have “significantly reduced the use of those sites in the UK”. Who to trust?

BPI head Geoff Taylor said that the organisation had attempted to work with the sites newly added to the UK internet blacklist, but all had refused. He said in a statement: “We asked the sites to stop infringing copyright but unfortunately they did not and we were left with little choice but to apply to the court”.

As previously reported, web-blocking was a provision ultimately left out of the still to be enacted anti-file-sharing provisions of the 2010 Digital Economy Act. But as the music industry waits for the cold day in hell when the ‘graduated response’ anti-piracy system outlined in the DEA comes into force, its trade body (well, technically the movie industry’s trade body, the BPI then followed) discovered that existing copyright law was there to help when it came to the blockade party.

The full list of newly blocked sites is as follows:

Abmp3
BeeMP3
Bomb-Mp3
FileCrop
FilesTube
Mp3Juices
eMp3World
Mp3lemon
Mp3Raid
Mp3skull
NewAlbumReleases
Rapidlibrary
1337x
BitSnoop
ExtraTorrent
Monova
TorrentCrazy
TorrentDownloads
TorrentHound
Torrentreactor
Torrentz