Hollywood film studios have won a significant battle in their ongoing war on online piracy, after the UK High Court ruled that British Telecom (BT) must block access to an illegal file-sharing website.
BT users will no longer be able to download illegally films and TV shows for free from Newzbin2.
The case against BT, brought by The Motion Picture Association, the trade body whose members include Warner Bros, Fox, Disney and Paramount Pictures, and is seen as a landmark ruling.
The verdict is likely to encourage more members of the creative industries to take action against filesharing websites by demanding ISPs block them.
The Guardian reported thatJustice Arnold said in his ruling: “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."
"[BT] 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," Justice Arnold added.
The ruling comes as a blow to BT who had argued that forcing it to ban its 6 million UK customers from accessing a website would usher in a new wave of online censorship.