Piracy crackdown: Village Roadshow launches legal action to block 41 websites

Target sites revealed

Village Roadshow has begun legal proceedings to block customers of Australia’s largest ISPs from accessing 41 websites that the company says are associated with online piracy.

Roadshow, backed by a group of six film studios, today filed its application for injunction with the Federal Court.

In its half-year results, the company foreshadowed the anti-piracy crackdown.

The move follows successful applications for injunction last year by Roadshow and Foxtel. Late last year the Federal Court granted site-blocking applications by the two parties, compelling major ISPs to block access to Solar Movie, The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound and IsoHunt.

A separate site-blocking application has been launched by Australian music labels, which are seeking to have Telstra, Optus, TPG and Foxtel’s broadband arm block access to Kickass Torrents. A judgement is yet to be handed down in that case.

In its new application, Roadshow names Telstra, Optus, Vocus and TPG, as well as the telcos’ subsidiaries, which include many of Australia’s best known ISPs such as iiNet, Internode and Dodo.

Roadshow is explicitly seeking court orders modelled on those granted in response to its previous application. Although in that case, the ISPs did not object to imposing website blocks, the ISPs on one hand and Roadshow and Foxtel on the other clashed over who should pay the costs of implementing the website blocks as well as the precise orders the court should grant.

A particular source of conflict was the model for a “rolling injunction” — the means by which proxy and mirror sites could be captured by the site-blocking injunction. In the end, the ISPs prevailed on that front, with the court deciding it would have oversight to any additions to the list of blocked domains, URLs and IP addresses. In addition, the court agreed that the rights holders should pay for the cost of implementing blocks.

In its new application, Roadshow’s proposed orders would see it pay ISPs $50 per domain name blocked and file an affidavit when seeking to block new mirror and proxy sites.

“Foxtel certainly intends to take advantage of the site blocking legislation, but we don’t have an update of sites we’re looking into at the moment,” a Foxtel spokesperson told Computerworld.

The sites targeted in the new Roadshow application are:

• 123Movies

• Alluc

• Bitsnoop

• Couchtuner

• Demonoid

• Extra.to

• ExtraTorrent.cc

• EYNY

• EZTV

• FMovies

• GenVideos

• Hdmovieswatch

• Icefilms

• Kinogo

• KissCartoon

• Limetorrents

• MegaShare

• Movie4k

• Phimmoi

• Piratebay.to

• PrimeWire

• Putlockers.ch.

• Putlocker.plus

• Putlocker.run

• Putlockers.vip

• Rarbg

• RIsbb

• Shush

• Softarchive

• Spoacemov

• Tehparadox

• Torrent Downloads

• Torrentproject

• Viooz

• WatchFree

• WatchSeries

• Xemphimso

• Xmovies8.org

• XMovies8.tv

• Yify Torrent

• YTS

Many sites have multiple URLs listed for them.

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Tags copyrightpiracyVillage Roadshowcopyright infringementsite blocking laws

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