UK ISPs start blocking Torrent Website Proxies in Secret

As we have already discussed in this article, the UK courts last year (2012) ordered all major ISP’s to block access to The Pirate Bay, an order that was later extended to cover a further five of the world’s largest online BitTorrent tracker listing websites, including Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy.

In response to this, hundreds of proxy sites appeared, using alternative domain names (and IP addresses) to point towards the censored pages, and thereby making something of a mockery of IP blocks that have been put in place.

However, the terms of the court ruling permitted the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a music industry body with a strongly ant-piracy stance and who were one of the main bodies backing the ban, the right to add sites without any further judicial oversight. Although a few proxy websites have been blocked in the past, it seems the BPI has decided to up its game, and has released an extensive new list of websites to be blocked.

While this move doesn’t really come as a surprise, we do find the fact that these sites are being blocked in secret to be somewhat bizarre! After all, why would the BPI not want the public to see these lists? The BPI’s only response to this question has been that “it would not be appropriate for us to do so”.

Surely as the basis for their list is a court ruling permitting no further legal intervention (nice to see the courts abrogate their responsibility to see proof before judgement), that makes the list subject to to the Freedon Of Information Act and liable to prosecution should they fail to provide the data within a reasonable period. They are bound by the court since they have de-facto, given the right for the BPI to censor the internet unchecked under English common law based on that ruling alone. The courts are covered by the FOIA. Maybe ask the court to provide the evidence of the continuing implementation of it’s ruling.

That is a very good point! The BPI is of course not subject to the FOIA, but the court ruling under which it is permitted to add sites without further judicial oversight is. I don’t currently how it works, but I will look into how to make an FOIA request of the courts….