8 websites that offer streaming or torrents are going to be blocked. This is thanks to an injunction granted by an Irish judge.
The sites include rarbg, EZTV and GoMovies. Some are public BitTorrent sites. Others offer free streaming. Now, all could be blocked in Ireland thanks to an injunction that was recently granted in Ireland. Irish ISPs are not contesting the blocks.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) brought the complaint to the court in Ireland, demanding that the major ISPs block those sites for their subscribers. From The Independent:
Counsel said the association was concerned because the sites had “very substantial numbers” of users in Ireland. Movies and programmes on one of the sites had been viewed between 1.5m and 1.3m times, counsel said.
Counsel said that those behind the websites had hidden anything to do with their identities or their physical location.
Correspondence was sent from the associations lawyers to the sites, via e mail, concerning the copyright infringements, but no responses had been received, counsel said.
Counsel said similar orders have been granted by the Irish courts in relation to other sites that had been involved in such activities.
While lawyers contend that blocking websites is effective, it is widely known that BitTorrent sites are known to simply switch domains to evade such blocks.
One well known example is the Pirate Bay’s “Hydra Bay” initiative started a few years earlier. The idea is that the website can easily switch domains whenever a block crops up. This includes living on as a .onion site on top of a handful of other domains. In addition to this, there are many proxies that allow access to the site along with mirrors of the site. As such, the website is able to continue to live on anyway in spite of court orders in jurisdictions to have the site blocked.
As such, many observers might think of this as little more than another case of “whack-a-mole” file-sharing has been famous for. It remains to be seen if the blocks will actually be effective this time around.
We’ve reached out to RarBG for comment and will update you if we hear back.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
