The London High Court, following a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of Europe (MPA), issued a new court order binding most of the major UK broadband ISPs (eg. BT, Sky Broadband, Talk Talk, Virgin Media, Plusnet etc.) to block 19 websites that were found to be facilitating copyright infringement on the Internet (piracy).
Such blocking orders, which are backed by Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Law (CDPA), they are expensive to bring, but in recent years they have become quite common. Hundreds of websites have been blocked using this approach (thousands if you include your many proxies and mirrors), generally including file sharing (P2P / Torrent), video streaming sites, and those selling counterfeit products (infringing trademarks, etc.)
NOTE: In 2015, Wiggin LLP claimed that an unopposed app tends to cost around ยฃ 14,000 per site, while the cost for ISPs to keep such systems up to date was around ยฃ 3,600 per site per year.
Despite the cost of all this, rights holders often see it as a price worth paying as part of their broader efforts to discourage casual piracy. Some studies (example) have similarly suggested that blocking piracy websites tends to lead to increased traffic targeting legal alternatives.
Both Sky Broadband (here) Y Virgin Media (here) maintain a public list of the websites that they have been asked to block by court order, which does not include the many duplicates and associated clones that are also included in such orders. According to Torrentfreak, the last order was only placed on July 1, 2021, and it normally takes a little time before such things are fully implemented, so the 19 new additions (some of which are mirrors of existing blocks) still they do not appear in the lists mentioned above.
All 19 additional sites (domain suffixes removed)
1movies. ****
azm. **
bflix. **
couchtuners. *
couchtuner. *******
couchtuner. ****
couchtuner. *****
fmovie. **
lookmovie. **
moviesjoy. **
myflixer. **
series9. **
soap2day. **
vidcloud9. ***
vumoo. **
watch the movie.****
look a lot. **
simovies. ***
yify-movies. ***
The problem with all of this is that such blocks do not always stop websites themselves and, in fact, can even help publicize their existence. Furthermore, those who are actively involved in hacking on the internet will be able to easily circumvent the restrictions using all sorts of different approaches, such as DNS changes, proxy servers, or virtual private network (VPN) connections. Mind you, DNS providers may be the next target (here).
