More P2P Internet Piracy Sites Named for Court Ordered UK ISP Censorship

Music licensing firm PPL appears to have revealed a list of new websites, which are accused of file sharing (P2P) based copyright infringement (internet piracy), that the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) will shortly attempt to have blocked via major broadband ISPs in the UK.

So far Rights Holders have already managed to use Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (here) to have two similar websites, Newbinz and The Pirate Bay, blocked through a court ordered injunction against Sky Broadband, Everything Everywhere (Orange UK and T-Mobile), TalkTalk, O2, BE Broadband and Virgin Media.

BT become the last of the big UK based broadband ISPs to block The Pirate Bay website at the end of last month (here) and since then many people have asked, who next? ISPreview.co.uk contacted the BPI last month to ask this very same question but received no reply.

Now TorrentFreak has revealed the contents of a leaked letter from PPL, which appears to outline a list of BitTorrent (P2P) sites that the BPI has an interest in. Specifically the PPL asks whether any of its members have licensed their music to the sites, which is unlikely, before directing them to inform the BPI’s legal team before 10th July 2012.

The Targetted BitTorrent/P2P Sites
– Extratorrent
– Demonoid
– Kickass Torrents
– H33T
– Torrent Reactor
– Fenopy

The clear implication of this move is to double check the sites before they’re targeted through the same process as before, which initially saw the BPI asking for ISPs to voluntarily block The Pirate Bay and Newzbin; before ultimately imposing an injunction to do so through the courts. Big internet providers always require a court order for suck blocks.

Meanwhile visitors to The Pirate Bay have, thanks to the huge amount of publicity, continued to rise. Similarly one of Europe’s largest ISPs, XS4ALL, recently published a graph showing that overall P2P traffic through its network had actually increased since an identical restriction was imposed against Dutch providers.

As revealed in our recent article – How to Keep Your Data Private and Browse the Internet Anonymously – ISPs do not have any real control over content that exists on remote servers (the internet), thus any blocks are usually skin deep and easy to circumvent (VPN, Proxy Servers etc.). Even something as simple as using the Turbo Mode on Opera.com’s website browser is often enough to break such restrictions, thus all the court orders seem to do is help advertise where people can access the content.