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23 December 2021PatentsAlex Baldwin

Australian court orders ISPs to block 101 pirate sites

The Australian Federal Court has ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to more than 100 pirate streaming and torrent websites.

The  judgment handed down on Tuesday, December 21, demands that 48 ISPs prevent their customers from accessing several internet domains linked to media piracy.

A collective of movie and TV studios, including  Disney,  Netflix and  Warner Brothers bought the complaint before the court following a five-year legal battle to get the domains taken down.

All named ISPs, including  Telstra,  Optus and  Vodafone must, within 15 business days of the order, disable access to the listed domains and redirect users to a webpage hosted by the applicants.

Disney, Netflix, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia Pictures, Universal and Roadshow Films successfully convinced the Federal Court to block several other pirate streaming websites in December 2016.

The movie giants then teamed up with Television Broadcasts Limited and TVBI Company to file a new lawsuit targeting the 101 pirate and torrenting sites, according to  TorrentFreak.

Widening the net

Judge John Nicholas largely agreed with the proposed blocking orders set out by the studios but took issue with two (12 and 13), which looked to broaden the scope of the injunction.

Order 12 required any changes to domains, IP addresses, or URLs to be classified as a “new location” for the pirate sites. The judge held that the order should require a certificate of good faith belief of this “new location” to be certified by a solicitor.

“If the order 12 procedure is to be invoked then I think it is important that the Court be able to take some comfort in the fact that the solicitor for the applicants will have certified that he or she, and the applicants, have a good faith belief in the matter,” said Nicholas.

Proposed order 13 suggested that a website operating under a name that is “substantially the same” to the targetted domains, allowing order 12 to extend to entirely different websites with similar branding.

The reason for this order, according to one of the applicant’s witnesses, is that some of the pirate services have “brands” that stretch across different websites, which signals to users that they are somehow related to previously blocked websites.

The witness gave the example of the pirate brand “123Movies” which can be found across numerous websites.

While Nicholas agreed that the proposed order would target websites undergoing a name change in order to circumvent the injunction, he contended:

“It may also apply to a website that has a name that is similar to an existing target online location (as defined) but which is not related in any way, other than by similarity of name to an existing target online location.”

Therefore, the judge instead proposed a system where copyright holders can make separate applications in the same proceeding to extend the orders to include the new websites if they are found to be infringing.

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