A group of major Hollywood studios and Netflix have won a London High Court injunction to have five pirate video streaming web destinations blocked by major ISPs in the UK. TorrentFreak reports that the streaming sites have been in the Motion Picture Association's (MPA's) crosshairs for some time.
The UK's major ISPs that will have to comply with the injunction are; BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media. Together, these ISPs provide 90 per cent of the UK's fixed line broadband market, so they are popular targets for such injunctions.
Sites that are going to be blocked from casual access in the UK due to "copyright infringement: communication," via these ISPs, are:
- Tinyzonetv.to, with 16.5 million visits per month,
- Watchserieshd.tv, with 10 million visits per month,
- Levidia.ch, with 4.5 million visits per month,
- 123movies.online,
- and Europixhd.net.
In the High Court, Mrs Justice Falk agreed with the movie industry group's claims that the sites operated illegally, reports TorrentFreak. This is despite the sites not hosting content, only links to third-party sites. "In my view, the Target Websites do authorize infringing acts of copying by users, and indeed positively encourage and facilitate it," noted the judge on the injunction order. "The fact of extensive copying by users can be inferred from the quantity of material indexed on the Target Websites, their purpose of making the content available and the extent of traffic to the sites".
Interestingly, the majority of the pirate streaming sites use Cloudflare’s delivery platform. Therefore, in order to block the sites without collateral damage, the complainants are going to request that Cloudflare allocate the pirate sites dedicated IP addresses. Cloudflare's cooperation will facilitate content blocking at the IP level without affecting other 'innocent' Cloudflare customers.
It might take some weeks before UK users see ISPs implement their IP-level blocks for the above pirate streaming portals.
