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Another swathe of torrenting and streaming sites will be blocked under Australian law thanks to a judgment in the Federal Court case between Village Roadshow and Australian internet service providers (ISPs).
Roadshow, which leads a group of film studios including Disney, Universal, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, and Paramount, initiated legal action earlier this year to to block 42 sites including Demonoid, ExtraTorrent, LimeTorrents, MegaShare, Piratebay.to, and EZTV.
Roadshow had said it would be targeting four types of piracy websites: Search engines; peer-to-peer torrent sites; sites that link to other sites hosting copyright content; and sites that provide direct access to copyright content through streaming or direct downloads.
Roadshow had previously been successful in getting the Federal Court to order more than 50 ISPs to block the Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, and SolarMovie and their related proxy sites at the end of last year.
Under that ruling, rights holders are to pay a AU$50 fee per domain they wanted to block, with the websites to be blocked within 15 business days.
Foxtel had also initiated proceedings in an additional case earlier this year in an effort to block 128 alleged foreign copyright-infringing torrenting and streaming websites including Yes Movies, Watch Series, 1337x, and Putlocker.
“Foxtel sees utility in orders of this nature,” counsel for Foxtel last week commented when Justice Burley said blocking piracy websites was like whack-a-mole, as sites simply pop up elsewhere when one is blocked.
Website blocking was legislated under the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act, which passed both houses of Parliament in mid-2015 and allows rights holders to obtain a court order to block websites hosted overseas that are deemed to exist for the primary purpose of infringing or facilitating infringement of copyright under Section 115A.
In June, Foxtel had said it would be seeking to block an additional 73 domain names, 68 of which belong to The Pirate Bay and five to Torrentz.
This was in addition to the 17 websites with 127 URLs it said it would be targeting in early June, after launching its case in May.
Foxtel has also appeared on the other side of a piracy site-blocking court case in its capacity as an ISP when four music studios — Universal Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment Australia, Warner Music Australia, and J Albert & Son — successfully blocked Kickass Torrents and its related proxy websites in April.
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