British music industry body the BPI has confirmed a significant step-up in its campaign to get popular filesharing sites blocked by ISPs in the UK.
Previous high court actions have seen four sites blocked by the largest ISPs here: The Pirate Bay, Kat, H33t and Fenopy. From tomorrow, 21 more will be added to the blacklist, after a high court ruling.
The new sites include nine torrent trackers – 1337x, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Monova, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, torrentHound, Torrentreactor and Torrentz – and 12 “aggregator” sites – Abmp3, BeeMP3, Bomb-Mp3, eMp3World, FileCrop, FilesTube, Mp3Juices, Mp3lemon, Mp3Raid, mp3skull, NewAlbumReleases and Rapidlibrary.
The BPI told Music Ally that the 21 sites were all contacted over the summer and asked to stop infringing copyright, but claims their responses were unsatisfactory: hence the high court action.
“Music companies are working hard to build a thriving digital music sector in the UK, offering fans great convenience, choice and value, but these efforts are undermined by illegal sites which rip off artists and contribute nothing to Britain’s vibrant music scene,” said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor in a statement.
“We asked the sites to stop infringing copyright, but unfortunately they did not and we were left with little choice but to apply to the Court, where the judge considered the evidence and declared that ISPs should not serve access to them.”
The news had leaked in part, after the BPI’s US counterpart, the RIAA, mentioned in a submission to the US Trade Representative that four of the sites were about to be blocked in the UK: Torrentz, ExtraTorrent, BitSnoop and FilesTube.
A number of the sites that will be blocked from tomorrow figure prominently on Google’s Transparency Report of sites receiving copyright takedown requests for its search engine. FilesTube URLs have been the subject of 7.5m complaints in the last year, with Rapidlibrary (3.6m), Torrentz (3m), BeeMP3 (2.6m), TorrentHound (1.9m) and BitSnoop (1.7m) also in its top 20.
The BPI is continuing its pressure on Google to demote these sites in its search results, while also working with the advertising industry in an effort to squeeze ad revenues for piracy sites.
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