Future UK Trade Deals May Add Piracy Website Blocks by ISPs

In a sign of things to come, it’s interesting to note that the recent free trade agreement between Australia and the United Kingdom included measures that require both sides to provide injunctive relief for website blocking by broadband ISPs – targeted at sites that are found to be facilitating internet copyright infringement (piracy).

At present such blocking orders, which in the UK flow from Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA), aren’t cheap to bring but have in recent years become very common. Hundreds of websites have been blocked through this approach (thousands if you include their many proxies and mirrors), which usually include file sharing (P2P / Torrent), streaming sites, Sci-Hub and those that sell counterfeit goods etc.

Similar laws exist in Australia, where the country’s Federal Court has demanded that dozens of Internet Service Providers ensure they are preventing subscribers from accessing over 100 website domains linked to pirate content. Such blocks are of course easy to circumvent via various different methods, but the goal is usually aimed more at reducing casual infringement by people who would probably give up after hitting a block.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note how TorrentFreak has spotted that the recent free trade agreement between the UK and Australia  – specifically ‘Chapter 15: Intellectual Property‘ – includes a provision for blocking orders related to pirated content. This also extends to the disclosure of ISP subscriber details and procedures for domain registrars, like Nominet in the UK.

Article 15.89
Blocking Orders

1. Each Party shall provide that its civil judicial authorities have the authority to grant an injunction against an ISP within its territory, ordering the ISP to take action to block access to a specific online location, in cases where:

(a) that online location is located outside the territory of that Party; and

(b) the services of the ISP are used by a third party to infringe copyright or related rights in the territory of that Party.

2. For greater certainty, nothing in this Article precludes a Party from providing that its judicial authorities may grant an injunction to take action to block access to online locations used to infringe intellectual property rights in circumstances other than those specified in paragraph 1.

Article 15.90
Procedures for Domain Registrars

Each Party shall encourage its domain registry to take appropriate, timely, and effective measures to suspend domains used for infringing intellectual property on their respective country-code top-level domains. That encouragement may be satisfied by measures including the facilitation of cooperative arrangements between, the relevant domain registry, law enforcement, and industry groups.

Article 15.91
Disclosure of Information

A Party may provide, in accordance with its law, that its competent authorities may order an ISP to disclose expeditiously to a right holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement, where that right holder has filed a legally sufficient claim of trade mark or copyright or related rights infringement, and where that information is being sought for the purpose of protecting or enforcing those rights.

On the surface, this won’t change much for the UK and Australia, which already have similar provisions and approaches to copyright infringement, but there’s more to it than that. The text appears to flow, at least in part, from an earlier recommendation, which was tabled by the Alliance for Intellectual Property (see here).

As part of that, the alliance noted that such text “will send an important message to future countries that we might choose to negotiate trade agreements with.” The goal here is thus not to add anything particularly new to existing UK and Australian law, but rather to try and export such measures to countries that may not yet have them in place via future trade deals.

Whether this will work is unclear, but it’s probably easier to advocate for the inclusion of such provisions than other things in modern trade deals.