UK ISPs Block Two More File Sharing Sites

Six of the UK’s largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have started blocking access to two sites accused of copyright violations.

BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky, EE and O2 are all believed to have complied with a court order won by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to block Movie 2K and Download4All.

The MPA, the international arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said the two sites, which let users download or stream movies, broke the UK Copyright, Design and Patents Act.

File sharing sites blocked

However the pro-piracy Pirate Reverse Group has already created a copy of the site that Internet users can access if they are blocked, similar to the number of Pirate Bay proxy sites available on the web.

The Pirate Bay has been unavailable in the UK since April 2012 as a result of a lawsuit brought by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). In March, the High Court ordered ISPs to block another three popular peer-to-peer file-sharing resources – Kickass-Torrents, Fenopy and H33T.

The BPI is also reportedly circulating a list of 25 websites it says are providing links to pirated music, including Grooveshark, Isohunt, Filestube and Monova. The list is being shared among record labels and recording companies to see if any of the BPI’s members have licensed music to the sites.

Critics have argued that such bans are pointless due to the number of ways to circumnavigate the bans and that the volume of users accessing the sites in question quickly grew to pre-pan levels.

It has been suggested that instead, the media industry should instead focus its resources on finding additional sources of revenue and that legal services such as Spotify did more to combat piracy.

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