Two lords for the Liberal Democrat party (Lord Razzall and Lord Clement-Jones) have proposed new amendments to the Government's endlessly controversial Digital Economy Bill that would force UK broadband ISPs into blocking any website deemed to contain "a substantial proportion of [CONTENT]" that infringes copyright.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) fears that such sweeping powers, if taken too literally, could lead to popular websites like YouTube being removed from public view. Indeed an overzealous individual might say that most shared videos will contain some level of unauthorised copyright content but that is surely an extreme perspective.

Details to be inserted after Clause 16

(1) The High Court (in Scotland, the Court of Session) shall have power to grant an injunction against a service provider, requiring it to prevent access to online locations specified in the order of the Court.

(2) In determining whether to grant an injunction under subsection (1), the Court shall have regard to the following matters—

(a) whether a substantial proportion of the content accessible at or via each specified online location infringes copyright,

(b) the extent to which the operator of each specified online location has taken reasonable steps to prevent copyright infringing content being accessed at or via that online location or taken reasonable steps to remove copyright infringing content from that online location (or both),

(c) whether the service provider has itself taken reasonable steps to prevent access to the specified online location, and

(d) any other matters which appear to the Court to be relevant.

(3) An application for an injunction under subsection (1) shall be made on notice to the service provider and to the operator of each specified online location in relation to which an injunction is sought.

It's worth pointing out that the original Digital Britain report also proposed the blocking of similar websites, with the main target being those that house masses of links to copyright infringing BitTorrent (P2P) downloads. These measures are nothing new and have always been expected, despite being incredibly easy to circumvent.

However the new proposal might actually be tougher to impose than the old one because it would require intervention from the High Court. This would mean that no technical measure restrictions against related websites could be forcibly imposed without some degree of prior legal hassle.

In addition somebody should probably remind the lords that BitTorrent links do not actually contain any content, which is instead hosted on user computer systems and not the website itself.