// Home / News

Film body asks BT to block file-sharing site

By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 16 Dec 2010 at 11:10

BT faces a court order to block access to a website accused of illegally sharing movies.

The European branch of the Motion Picture Association has asked a court to order the ISP to block access to Newzbin2, a Usenet search tool that it accuses of hosting copyright content.

A British court shut down the original Newzbin in March 2010 after a complaint from the MPA, but a second version with the same code and domain name has since cropped up.

While Newzbinz's original operators claim they have nothing to do with Newzbin2, the head of MPA Europe Chris Marcich told The Guardian the resurrected site "flies in the face of the previous judgement by the High Court".

The MPA applied for the injunction under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, which the UK inherited from an EU directive.

"Like all other content providers, we need cooperation from key stakeholders to ensure that a legitimate content market can flourish," Marcich said.

BT has yet to say how it intends to respond. "We can confirm that we have received the papers from the MPA and are reviewing them," a spokesperson told PC Pro. "We will respond in due course."

Subscribe to PC Pro magazine. We'll give you 3 issues for £1 plus a free gift - click here

From around the web

User comments

Do they not understand!

They will never be able to shut it down, ever. And it will only cost failing trying it. I said this before, why don;t the movie industry buy newzbin and make money from it instead of wasting it on trying to defeat it, as long as there is usenet there will be a tool to search it. and usenet is invincible. and if they are trying to shut down newzbin why not any other websites, just type usenet search into google and you get a lot of services that do it for, you! top result from google is binsearch so surely this is the most visited website from all usenet search websites out there, why is it newzbin suddenly the website that you want to shut down.

By mobilegnet on 16 Dec 2010