Norway Blocklist Expanded

The entertainment industry recently filed a complaint in Norway asking to expand a blockade of file-sharing services (including us) that was enforced in 2015. The MPA sought to add new Internet service providers and more websites to the Norway’s blocklist. This complaint was satisfied, but critics believe that it’s unfair to hold ISPs responsible for their subscribers’ copyright infringement.

The MPA, representing a number of Hollywood studios, applied to a court in Norway more than a year ago seeking to have 7 “pirate” services blocked at the ISP level. These services included The Pirate Bay, Movie4K and us, for example. The case was filed in the Oslo District Court against local Internet service providers. In September 2015 the court ordered the ISPs to block all the websites listed in the lawsuit.

Industry observers expected more blocking requests from Hollywood right away, but the studios kept silence for more than a year. Now they are back with fresh requests against more Internet service providers. Additional sites are also named in the new complaint, including Putlocker, Watch32, Project Free TV and others. The court satisfied this complaint as well. It is known that the new ruling is considerably shorter than the previous one, which means that the process has now been streamlined.

Apparently, the court issued a ruling based on the fact that the “pirate” websites published links to copyrighted content already available on the Internet, thus publishing the content to a “new public”. As a result, the Internet service providers were ordered to implement DNS blockades to cover the domains currently in use. However, DNS block is the weakest form of blocking and can be easily circumvented by switching to another provider like Google.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.