14 DAY TRIAL // The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has won a court ruling that forces UK's largest ISP, BT, to use its child abuse filtering system to block a Usenet indexing website called Newzbin2.
Back in 2010, the MPA won a legal victory against Newzbin, but instead of shutting down, the site changed owners and moved outside the UK.
Faced with a new and better version, Newzbin2, the MPA opted for a different approach, to have the website blocked for as many Internet users as possible.
With over 5.6 million subscribers, BT was the obvious target, but the ISP didn't take it without a legal fight. It provided several arguments of why it shouldn't be forced to block the website, but the court rejected them all.
"In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the Studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes.
"It knows that the users of Newzbin2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin2," ruled Justice Arnold of the High Court of Justice in London today.
The ruling sets a dangerous precedent because Newzbin2 doesn't host any actual infringing files. Instead it hosts torrent-like NZB files that simplify downloading from Usenet.
BT is being forced to use a technology called Cleanfeed that it developed back in 2004 to filter abusive URLs supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation. At the time it expressed fears that one day it might be asked to use Cleanfeed to police the Internet.
BT plans to challenge the ruling. "We will return to court after the summer to explain what kind of order we believe is appropriate," it said according to TorrentFreak.