UK Court Orders ISPs to Block 21 File Sharing Sites

Internet Service Providers have been issued a court order to block access to 21 websites who according to the British Recording Music Industry (BPI), provide access to pirated music.

As of tomorrow, October 30th, a High Court Judge has ordered for all of the sites to  be blocked, including a host of aggregator sites. FilesTube, Bitsnoop, extraTorrent, Monova, TorrentHound, Torrentreactor, 1337x and Torrentz.eu are included in the ban.

BPI represents the interests of the British record industry and in recent years has been pushing for a collective effort to ban torrent sites. In 2012 BPI was responsible for the shutdown of The Pirate Bay in the UK.

“We asked the sites to stop infringing copyright, but unfortunately they did not and we were left with little choice but to apply to Court, where the judge considered the evidence and declared that ISPs should not serve access to them,” said Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of BPI.

In a separate effort, BPI is hoping Google will begin to rank these pirate sites lower in its search results to help eliminate easy access. In a previous speech, Taylor had said, “I don’t think it’s enough for Google to sit back and say, tell me each illegal file one by one and we’ll remove the results. If Google is clever enough to teach a computer to think, it’s clever enough, when it has been told more 150,000 times that The Pirate Bay is illegal, to rank that site below Amazon and iTunes when consumers search for music.”