Court orders Finnish ISPs to block RABRG and YIFY
The Market Court, a venue specialized in copyright, competition, and market law disputes in Finland on Thursday ordered seven Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to the popular torrent sites, RARBG and YIFY. According to the court, although operators of the sites in question are unknown, they do make a significant amount of revenue by illegally sharing copyright-infringing content.
“The anonymous administrators of both services earn substantial sums of advertising money by illegally sharing content made by others,” the Market Court notes, quoted by Helsingin Sanomat.
For those unaware, RARBG and YIFY are the most popular torrenting sites in Finland with an estimated 520,000 visits per month. According to recent research, Finns download roughly 12 million movies and 32 million TV-shows from unauthorized sources per year.
The court order applies to ISPs such as DNA, Elisa, TeliaSonera Finland, Blue Lake Communications, Kaisanet, Lounea and MPY. The Court has directed these ISPs to must remove the domains they use from pirated sites on their servers and also prevent their clients from accessing the sites’ IP-addresses.
The fight against blocking pirate websites dates back to 2011 when Finland became one of the first countries that ordered the ISPs to block The Pirate Bay (TPB). The decision was opposed by many ISPs with one of them even trying to have the matter heard at the Supreme Court. However, they got no respite and the blocks remained.
Although there have been much-pirating incidences in Finland lately, the copyright holders were still issued two fresh blocking orders this week.
It remains to be seen how effective the blockades are, considering that users in such a scenario bypass these type of restrictions, either through proxies and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), or just by switching to sites that are not blocked yet.
It is not known if any of the ISPs plan to appeal the Market Court’s most recent decision.
Source: TorrentFreak
