London – The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has filed a
complaint in a U.K. court, seeking an injunction that would compel ISP BT to
block U.K. users from accessing Newzbin2, a site that indexes media files
available for download on Usenet, TorrentFreak reported.
U.S. movie studios
previously won a U.K. High Court victory that resulted in the shutdown of the
original Newzbin; a similar index, Newzbin2, has since sprung up online.
The
MPA cites the European Union Copyright Directive, which "has been used
successfully in Denmark to block rogue sites hosting illegal material, with
further cases pending in Germany, Holland and Belgium."
Newzbin said it
intends to fight the MPA in court.
"We will be looking to instruct lawyers
to fight this on behalf of our UK users. The MPA application to engage in
censorship of the Internet for their own petty interests would, if granted, set
a dangerous precedent in a Western democracy," Newzbin told TorrentFreak.
"We don’t want to engage in a polemic but we have fully cooperated with
DMCA requests from content owners and we are careful to act lawfully: ‘drive-by’
litigation such as this will cut off access to substantial legitimate content
and is entirely unwarranted & disproportionate."
Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/2dm97br
(TorrentFreak)
http://tinyurl.com/26mkc3q
(DMW previous coverage)
