The High Court has ruled that a judgement ordering BT to block Newzbin2, a site known for distributing pirated content, is valid.
The new ruling gives BT two weeks to comply, blocking the site and any other IP addresses associated with Newzbin2's operators.
In a rather harsh twist, the judgement also sees BT responsible for paying for the initial block, which the ISP has estimated as costing at least £5,000.
Pirate Party
The MPA, which first brought about the action, is pretty happy with the whole situation, with Chris Marcich, the MD of the European branch, saying, "Securing the intervention of the ISPs was the only way to put the commercial pirates out of reach for the majority of consumers."
However, there are some issues; firstly that the people behind Newzbin2 have already got work-arounds in place, which means that determined users can still access the site; this is partly why BT has been ordered to block additional URLs associated with Newzbin and its operators.
Justice Arnold, the judge who handed down the ruling, explains, "In my judgment an injunction limited to "sole purpose" would be too easily circumvented to be effective. Furthermore, I do not consider that the Studios should be obliged to return to court for an order in respect of every single IP address or URL that the operators of Newzbin2 may use."
BT last week warned that site blocking, which has never been proven to be 100% effective in the fight against piracy, could lead to a workarounds arms race.
Mita Mitra, the head of Internet Policy at BT, said: "We are seeing even from the Newzbin judgement, right off the blocks, the site began its evasive action.
"It's already on its second generation of evasive action. Same with Pirate Bay, we're seeing different generations of modification behaviour by the site to evade the blocking mechanism, as well as by end users who manage to work around the ISP [using a VPN or similar]."
