Internet Piracy has become rampant in recent years with thousands of websites offering illegitimate ways to download anything from the latest films to the latest Xbox games. Obviously this upsets the industries that produce and aim to sell such media, who in turn want our government to do something about it.
We’ve seen several cases of high profile torrent sites taken to court recently, most notably The Pirate Bay and Limewire. Another major torrent site has today suffered a hefty blow, thanks to a High Court ruling from a UK judge that internet service provider BT has to block access to the site.
Newzbin2 is a massive online torrent community offering free and illegal downloads of the latest movies, computer games, music and much more. The original site, Newzbin, was previously given a court order forcing them to cease operations, shut down the site and pay damages. The site owners have raised funds and enough helpers to get a new site running, aptly named Newzbin2.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) filed against Newzbin2 for offering its movies illegally online, and today a High Court Judge ruled that BT had to block the site’s access for their customers.
“In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the Studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes, it knows that the users of Newzbin2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin2,” he said.
So, due to BT’s knowledge of illegal file sharing on its network (let’s face it, which ISP doesn’t expect some customers to be using torrents?), their customers are now blocked from accessing the site.
We want to hear from BT internet customers about this decision, so let us know what you think by adding a comment below or tweeting us @Gadget_Helpline.