By: MarkJ - 9 November, 2011 (8:12 AM) - Score: 2869 - Fixed Line Broadband, Piracy

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), an international rights holder for the film industry, has sent a new letter to two major broadband ISPs, TalkTalk and Virgin Media UK, which demands that they follow by BT's recent example and also start blocking the Newzbin2 piracy website.

The wholly unsurprising move follows a recent ruling in London's High Court (here), which ordered (injunction) BT to impose an identical restriction upon the same site. The block itself finally began to take effect last week, despite BT's customers being easily and anonymously able to circumvent their Cleanfeed based internet filtering system (some did it just by typing the sites IP address).

According to ZDNet, the MPA's letter revealed that it plans to seek a court order against both providers (much as they did before with BT) and asked whether or not the ISPs would contest this.


Nobody would be surprised if Sky Broadband (BSkyB), Orange and O2 ( Be Broadband ) ended up receiving a similar letter in the not too distant future (assuming they haven't already). However, both Orange and O2 are significantly smaller, while Sky has also been an outspoken supporter of Rights Holders.

So far both TalkTalk and Virgin Media have said that they would require a court order before any block could be imposed, although both appear to have the technological ability to do as the MPA desires. Meanwhile the MPA itself claims to be focusing upon only "the most harmful sites". The fact that such placebo skin deep blocking doesn't actually work frequently appears to be ignored.

UPDATE 10th November 2011

As expected, Sky confirms that it has also received a copy of the letter and will similarly require a court order. It remains unclear whether any of the ISPs will contest the order (fight it in court) or simply agree to it.

Some might wish to simply agree to the order because they already have the necessary technology in place, although this runs the risk of setting a precedent for the future when more borderline sites might be brought forward as part of similar requests.

UPDATE 2

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has finally caught up and issued their opinion.