14 DAY TRIAL // The fight against online piracy, at the expense of personal freedoms, continues unabashed. The Motion Picture Association, a trade-group representing major Hollywood studios, is trying to make 'history' by asking the British High Court to force BT, the largest ISP in the UK, to block a website it says is a pirate's heaven.
If successful, it will be the first time this has happened in the UK though, sadly, other Western countries have gone down this route already, Italy being a prime example.
The MPA is asking the court to tell BT to use, or rather abuse, a system designed to filter out child pornography websites to block the piracy-related website.
The MPA is the international version of the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents studios such as Warner Bros., Fox, Disney and Paramount Pictures
Interestingly enough, the system was met with criticism when first installed, voluntarily by BT. Both BT and other groups were concerned that the system, dubbed Cleanfeed, would be abused and its initial use widened.
In fact, this isn't the first time the big media companies have wanted to use a similar system installed by another ISP in the UK to block sites it didn't like, TorrentFreak reports.
The MPA is targeting Newzbin2, a Usenet-related website which the complaint claims offers links to pirated content. The same group went after Newzbin, the precursor to the new website, in the past until the company behind it declared bankruptcy.
Rather than going against the new website, which is no longer located in the UK, the MPA is going at the root of the problem, trying to cut off access at the ISP level. It's targeting BT in particular, because it already has the technology to block it. How effective is the technology is an open question though, especially when targeting a single website.