UK gets green light to tackle online piracy

Telecoms providers BT and TalkTalk have lost an attempt to block aspects of the Digital Economy Act which they see as placing undue responsibility on them for tackling illegal filesharing.

The high-court ruling is a victory for record companies, film studios and other rights holders, who have lobbied intensively for greater legal powers to stem piracy. The two Internet service providers took on the government in the high court in a hearing last month, claiming that the act was disproportionate and broke European telecoms, privacy and e-commerce directives. Justice Kenneth Parker on April 20 dismissed the ISPs’ claims on all four of those grounds. The ISPs partially won a fifth element of the case, on cost-sharing, when the court ruled that the government cannot make the ISPs pay a section of the costs of operating the anti-piracy regime relating to Ofcom, the media regulator.