Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp v BT - The Game Changer

The English High Court's ruling that BT, the UK's largest internet service provider ("ISP"), must block access to the Newzbin website has fundamentally changed the game in the ongoing legal battle against online copyright infringement, but it may have unintended consequences.

The problem of online copyright infringement

Online copyright infringement has been a major headache for the film, television, music and gaming industries. Advances in computer and telecommunications technology have largely outpaced the business models of firm in these sectors. Although the legal online download market can no longer be said to be embryonic, it was slow to get started. And, of course, the illegal download market has a very attractive business proposition that's very hard to compete with: it's free.

A study by Ipsos MediaCAT in April 2010 analysing the scale of film and television piracy in the UK in 2009 estimated the overall loss from film piracy at £477 Million and the overall loss from television piracy at £58 Million. Another study by Tera Consultants dated March 2010 estimated the audio and audiovisual industries were losing 670 Million Euros in revenues from physical and digital piracy, and concluded that most of that was from digital piracy. That said, it's very hard to quantify the size of these illegal markets with any degree of statistical accuracy. The one thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that it's a serious problem.

Finding the right pressure points

Lawyers too have had trouble keeping up. Despite the many arguments and excuses of the end users of illegal download services such as Newzbin ("If I like a movie, I tend to buy it on DVD later"), it's always been very clear that downloading copyright material through via these services amounts to copyright infringement. However, it's been very difficult to track down and then tackle the end users directly. Those who have encounter difficulties in proving that the person alleged to have carried out the downloading (or uploading) actually did the deed ("Maybe someone used my unsecured WiFi connection?"). And although a police raid and seizure of the PC in question would almost certainly settle the question once and for all, it all seems a bit heavy handed and is, ultimately, an inefficient method of tackling what has become a very widespread practice.

The Lawyers then moved up the chain to the illegal download services themselves. Again, brushing aside arguments as to whether these...