UK Court Blocks Stream Aggregator’s Domain

Keywords: ISPs, domains, peer-to-peer websites, pirated material, sport

The latest in a line of cases in which English courts have ordered ISPs to block the domains of peer-to-peer websites showing pirated material has now applied the same principles to a hugely successful stream aggregator of sports content. This kind of remedy - against ISPs rather than the site's operators - is used when the operators of the site are hard to track down or, as in the Newzbin 2 case, where they ignore the injunction against them and move their servers offshore. The ISPs tend not to object, but the rights owner still has to prove its case.

Facts

On 16 July 2013, the Premier League took action in respect of a site called FirstRow, which indexed and aggregated streams of football and other sports broadcasts from streamers who in turn sourced these from user-generated content ("UGC") sites. FirstRow had a huge number of visitors (nearly 10 million in April), making it more popular than lastminute.com and the Financial Times website in recent months. Its advertising revenues were estimated at somewhere between £5m and £9m. The various domain names it used were often registered under false names and addresses and warning letters had been ignored. The sporting content was extremely valuable: UK...