14 DAY TRIAL // The anti-piracy association of the Austrian film and video industry has decided to sue four local ISPs after they didn’t comply with a request to block user access to streaming sites Movie4K.to and Kinox.to.
Additional legal action is expected to be taken against them for the failure to block The Pirate Bay, reports TorrentFreak.
Following a series of favorable rulings from the European Court of Justice and the local Supreme Court, Austrian anti-piracy groups have taken it upon themselves to launch an attack on ISPs that refused to restrict user access to any sites.
One line of assault involved VAP, an anti-piracy association for the Austrian film and video industry, while the second one involved the local branch of the International federation of the Photographic Industry, also known as IFPI.
UPC, Drei, Tele2 and A1 are the ISPs that were asked by VAP to block The Pirate Bay, as well as Movie4K.to and Kinox.to. Following the request from July, IFPI came with a second demand addressed to five ISPs that were being asked to restrict access to The Pirate Bay, isoHunt.to, 1337x.to and H33t.to.
Having learned a lesson from what happened months ago when the London Police sent out letters with no court order to back the request to block access to various torrent sites, the ISPs involved refused to block the sites without nothing more than a letter to go on.
Both anti-piracy groups have threatened with lawsuits, which seems to be the only way to get the ISPs to comply with their demands.
“[The decision on blocking] should be left to the judgment of a judge, since in a specific case the rights of Internet users and the movie / music industry can be weighed more,” said A1 spokeswoman Livia Dandrea-Böhm. “We will now take a position in the time allowed by the court. Thereafter, the judge has to decide.”
In its lawsuit, VAP has excluded The Pirate Bay from the list, but it seems like IFPI will make sure to include it among the sites it wants blocked in Austria.
While these copyright groups continue to try to block complete websites, either by casually including homepages in the DMCA notices they send or by getting a court order to force ISPs to deny users access to them, the measures don’t seem to work. In fact, people simply start using proxies or VPNs to circumvent the blockade and continue accessing the sites.
The Pirate Bay, for instance, makes use of the TOR network for its PirateBrowser to help users from a range of countries gain access to the site.