Customers of the Sky Broadband (BSkyB) service have this week joined those of BT in having their access to the controversial Newzbin2 piracy website blocked. Sky claims to have "received a court order requiring us to block access to this illegal website," which follows last month's warning letter by the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

The High Court of Justice (London) officially ordered BT to block the site in July 2011, which came after the MPA filed and successfully won an injunction against the broadband provider (here). The MPA then issued letters (here) to several other major UK ISPs ( TalkTalk , Virgin Media and Sky Broadband ) and called upon them to follow by BT's example.


Few will be surprised by this move, not least because Sky is both an ISP and a content provider (conflicting interests). However, Sky has always been dominated by its larger media business and is an often outspoken supporter of Rights Holders against internet copyright infringement (piracy).


Indeed many opponents of such measures, including quite a few ISPs, warn that it won't have much of an impact. Newzbin2 recently claimed that the majority of its active BT users have already downloaded the sites anti-censorship software, which circumvents ISP filtering systems. In fact there are many different ways to avoid such restrictions (e.g. VPN, Proxy Servers etc.). The only way to completely prevent such traffic is to prevent http/web access altogether.

Opponents also suggest that site blocking can be costly, ineffective and fails to address "the root causes of why people infringe copyright" (Consumer Focus). However for the time being it wouldn't be practical to request a Court Order for all the 'bad sites' and thus a Voluntary Code solution is still being developed (here).

Meanwhile the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled last month that measures, specifically those which order an ISP to install a system for filtering and blocking electronic communications in order to protect copyright, are effectively "illegal" under EU law (here). This ruling has yet to be tested in the UK.