UK High Court Adds 17 Internet Piracy Websites to the Block Lists of Big ISPs

The High Court in London has once again used Section 97A of the United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) to force major broadband ISPs into blocking their customers from being able to access 17 predominantly MP3 download sites, which were found to be facilitating Internet copyright infringement (piracy).

Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which were acting on behalf of the UK’s recorded music industry, appear to have pushed the case after first requesting that the ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, EE and O2) introduce a voluntary block. As usual the ISPs rejected that and so it went through the now very familiar court injunction process.

Generally it tends to take between a few days and a couple of weeks before the ISPs get around to adding new sites to their censorship lists. But at the time of writing Sky’s list of blocked sites had not yet been updated, although the new sites have already been blocked by most of the ISPs including Sky.

The 17 Blocked MP3 Sites

Bursalagu
Fullsongs
Mega-Search
Mp3 Monkey
Mp3.li
Mp3Bear
MP3Boo
Mp3Clan
Mp3Olimp
MP3s.pl
Mp3soup
Mp3Truck
Musicaddict
My Free MP3
Plixid
RnBXclusive
STAFA Band

We suspect that the impact of this particular list will be extremely limited, not least because it’s now much easier and cheaper to buy or stream music online legally, without needing to use an unlawful source.

Meanwhile the block orders aren’t likely to cripple the related sites and in fact they often merely serve to better advertise their existence. On the flip side those who do engage in Internet Piracy will easily be able to circumvent the restrictions by using all sorts of different approaches, such as Proxy Servers or Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections etc. All credit to TorrentFreak for spotting this.