28th July 2011

In a landmark high court ruling BT have been told they must block access to pirate movie down illegal download sites such as the member-only Newzbin 2 which supplies illegally copied material that is stored on the Usenet discussion forums.

This ruling is the first of its kind to see service providers being forced to take responsibility for content served over the internet and marks the way for further crackdowns on internet piracy.

Link sites such as Newzbin are different from traditional file sharing piracy sites that share content between users, linking sites simply link directly to the content stored on the Usenet network.  Usenet was used extensively in the early days of the internet as a forum to exchange messages and discussions but is generally not used at all now in favour of web and social media based traffic.

This high court ruling requires BT to use their Cleanfeed technology to block the site, a measure only previously adopted to block child abuse websites.  Its thought that pressure from digital rights owners is causing this sudden crackdown on pirated material.

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