UK and Italy take action against infringing sites

UK record companies have blocked 21 more popular file-sharing websites. Early this morning (Australian time), through action initiated by their industry trade body BPI, the UK’s six biggest Internet service providers were told by the High Court to block public access to the sites.

The six ISPs were BSkyB, BT, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Telefonica.

The BPI’s CEO Geoff Taylor revealed that his trade association had earlier approached the 21 alleged pirate sites to stop copyright infringement, but they had declined to cooperate. “We were left with little choice but to apply to the court,” he said. The sites included mp3skull, BeeMP3, Abmp3, NewAlbumReleases, Rapidlibrary, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Monova. TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads,TorrentHound, Torrentreactor and Torrentz.

The court action against the 21 sees an escalation of activity against such sites. It now brings to 25 the total of sites being affected, including Pirate Bay.

The BPI claims that such blocks “significantly reduced the use of those sites in the UK”. But analysts say the declining use of file-sharing sites is also attributable to the move to cloud-based models and streaming.

In the meantime, Italy is also putting into place plans to block pirate sites, and name-shame their operators. Its Electronic Communications Authority (ECA) has published draft policies that will give it authority to block and seize these sites if they refuse to act on takedown notices in three days. Currently, only a court can do that in Italy. The ECA also wants the power to force ISPs to identify the owners and operators of pirate sites. The European Commission will give its answer to the proposals by the end of November. If given the green light, the ECA can start taking action by early next year.

The move has been objected to by a group of lawyers, scholars and ISPs.