Court Date As Hollywood Seeks BT Injunction

Hollywood studios will use a High Court appearance tomorrow to demand that BT blocks its customers from accessing a file-sharing website.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents Hollywood studios such as Warner Bros, Fox, Disney and Paramount Pictures outside the United States, will ask the High Court tomorrow for an injunction to force BT to block its broadband customers from accessing a file-sharing website called Newzbin.

The Newzbin website is members-only and apparently offers links to film, television, music, as well as software downloads.

Second Attempt

This follows a similar move by the MPA back in December last year when it filed an injunction against BT, requiring it to block access to Newzbin2.

However it seems that that injunction failed to stop the illegal downloads because the operator of the site simply put itself into administration.

It then simply relocated itself overseas, outside the reach of the British judiciary.

The idea is now instead of trying force the file-sharing website offline, the MPA will on Tuesday instead seek to block access to it by BT customers.

The case is significant, because it could mark the first time that copyright holders will force an ISP to block websites under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act. If successful, the ruling will pave the way for more copyright holders to opt for court action for blocking orders.

However a spokesman for the Newzbin website reportedly told the Daily Telegraph that this latest legal attempt by the MPA would also fail.

The newspaper quoted a spokesman known only as “Mr White”, who apparently said that further court attempts to shut Newzbin down would fail because “we can run faster than them [the MPA] and shapeshift”.

The newspaper also quoted Lord Puttnam, the film producer and president of the Film Distributors’ Association, as saying that the continued existence of the website was “simply unacceptable”.

“The High Court found Newzbin guilty of infringing copyright and ordered it to stop and within a few weeks a new version appeared on the net,” Lord Puttnam said. He added that today’s action was an “important test case which we all hope will help us to prevent theft and infringement online”.

BT Reaction

So why is the MPA singling out BT for special treatment?

Well apparently it because BT is the UK’s largest ISP with 5.6 million customers. The carrier also reportedly already has the technology that could be adapted to block Newzbin. This reportedly refers to BT’s Cleanfeed system which is used to block access to overseas websites that offer images of child abuse.

“BT was chosen because it’s the largest and already has the technology in place, through its Cleanfeed system, to block the site,” MPA spokesman told the Daily Telegraph.

“If this case is successful, we would hope that other ISPs would take note of the result,” the spokesman added.

“We can confirm that we will be appearing in court, following an application for an injunction by members of the MPA. We have no further comment to make at this stage,” a BT spokesman told eWEEK Europe UK.

Under the terms of the UK’s Digital Economy Act, ISPs could be expected to hand over the IP addresses of anyone caught committing online copyright infringement to rights holders. However, opposition to the Digital Economy Act is strong, with ISPs and rights activists alike complaining that the Act’s measures did not receive sufficient scrutiny when the bill was pushed through Parliament in the final days of the then Labour government.