BT met with members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) at the High Court of Justice in London yesterday. The hearing allowed BT to explain how it intended to impose a court ordered block of the Newzbin2 website but critics fear that the move will result in "degraded internet services" and higher broadband ISP bills for all.

Newzbin2 is a Usenet (Newsgroup) indexing site that has also been deemed to facilitate "illegal" internet copyright infringement (piracy). The High Court ordered BT to block the site in July 2011 after the MPA filed an injunction against the ISP using Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (here).

Consumer Focus (CF), a statutory UK organisation that aims to support consumer rights, warns that the measure will be little more than a "blunt tool" because it fails to address "the root causes of why people infringe copyright". The group also warned that website blocking solutions are "crude" and could lead to everybody paying higher bills for their broadband.

Consumer Focus Concerns:

• Website blocking technology is crude – often perfectly legal sites are inadvertently blocked too, raising the issue of ISP subscribers being denied access to legal content and services.

• Expense – web blocking is an expensive option for ISPs. Effectively an ISP could end up facing multiple injunctions ad infinitum – our concern is that the expense incurred will end up on consumer bills, increasing the cost of broadband for all.

• Website blocking can also result in degraded internet services, meaning UK consumers could face a reduction in speed and network reliability.

On top of that ISP's have no physical control to remove or block content that doesn't exist within their own network, at least not without halting all web (http) traffic, which affords many ways to circumvent such restrictions. Newzbin2 has already made a mockery of the process by offering its own solution well before BT's block has even become active (here).


The Newzbin2 case was all about establishing a precedent and is currently unique to BT but will spread. The court felt that the ISPs Cleanfeed system, which works alongside the Internet Watch Foundation ( IWF ) to block child sexual abuse content, could be used to block the infringing website. Most of the big ISPs already have a similar system in place and a new Voluntary Code of Practice is being designed to help them use it (here).

In related news the Open Rights Group (ORG) has succeeded in using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to force the UK governments Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) into admitting that they "do not hold" any evidence on the scale and nature of infringement of copyright by websites (here). Indeed the recent Hargreaves Review also called for more evidence to guide policy making. So far many of the surveys and studies conducted, such as the BPI's infamous 7 Million illegal UK file sharers claim, have been somewhat less than impartial or reliable (example).