UK ISP Website Piracy Block List Adds Rojadirecta, LiveTV and Drakulastream

The Premier League and FA have succeeded in having the UK High Court force all of the markets largest broadband ISPs (e.g. BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and EE) into imposing blocks against three additional sports streaming websites that are known to infringe copyright (Rojadirecta, LiveTV and Drakulastream).

According to TorrentFreak, the new blocks appear to be an expansion of the original 2013 court order against the FirstRow website (here) and this brings the total number of related Internet piracy website blocks to around 128.

As usual such restrictions aren’t perfect and they remain incredibly easy to circumvent via Proxy Server or Virtual Private Networks (VPN) etc. Similarly it’s not cheap to impose such restrictions 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 addresses 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.