Big UK Internet Providers Forced to Block 7 Pirate eBook Websites

The United Kingdom’s five largest broadband ISPs, including BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and EE, have been ordered by the High Court to expand their mandatory website blocking (censorship) measures to include seven websites that facilitate the distribution of pirated eBooks (copyright infringement).

As in previous cases the Publishers Association (PA), with support from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), successfully used Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to secure a “blocking order” against the main UK ISPs, albeit only after first submitting a voluntary request for the providers to restrict access (broadband ISPs always reject those and that leaves the court to make a more informed decision).

Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of The PA, said:

“A third of publisher revenues now come from digital sales but unfortunately this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement. Our members need to be able to protect their authors’ works from such illegal activity; writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material.

We are very pleased that the High Court has granted this order and, in doing so, recognises the damage being inflicted on UK publishers and authors by these infringing websites.”

The websites in question apparently hold around 10,000,000 eBook titles and have allegedly been making “substantial sums of money” through advertising and referral fees, which clearly didn’t sit too well with the legitimate owners of the related content.

The Seven Blocked eBook Websites
Avaxhome
Bookfi
Bookre
Ebookee
Freshwap
Freebookspot
Libgen

The PA, whose members have previously issued nearly 1 million take down requests against the related sites, claimed that over 80% of the material available on them (and in some cases over 90%) infringes copyright. Similarly Google has also been asked to remove around 1.75 million related web addresses (URLs) from their Internet search engine.

The aforementioned ISPs now have 10 working days to implement the latest blocking requests, although such restrictions are little more than a placebo and remain incredibly easy to circumvent via Proxy Servers or Virtual Private Networks (VPN) etc.

However it’s not cheap to impose such blocks and last year’s effort to censor websites that distributed counterfeit goods (here) revealed that an unopposed application tends to cost around £14,000 per site. The admin involved in maintaining these and keeping ISPs up-to-date with related IP address and new URL changes also comes to around £3,600 per website per year. Similarly the ISPs claim to incur costs of anything from a few hundred to almost a thousand pounds per block.