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French court orders Google to block websites responsible for copyright infringement

By Mark Leiser, Research Fellow

December 4, 2013 | 3 min read

Website blocking started here in the UK with the decision to limit users’ access to Newzbin, a site linking to infringing material. Then the high court, empowered by section 97A of the Copyright Patent and Designs Act, took action by ordering the six largest internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

Now the French high court court has upped the stakes again by not only demanding French ISPs block access to 16 video file-sharing sites including fifostream and dpstream, but also ordering Google to remove the links from its search engine.

The unprecedented move highlights Google’s role as a gatekeeper. Dr Emily Laidlaw of the University of East Anglia refers to such gatekeepers as “communication technologies that enable or disable participation in discourse online are privately-owned”. As owners of the infrastructure and intelligence that make up the net, they are “gatekeepers to our digital democratic experience," Laidlaw says.

The effect of the order will make all 16 of the sites that the court ruled as participating in the “distribution of works without consent of their creators" likely disappear and be invisible to anyone who tries to search for or gain access to them while in France. When a user searches for the domains on Google, the search engine giant will not be allowed to return links to the file-sharing sites.

In a statement, the groups representing the rights holders said the ruling "recognised the merits of the approach [of] forcing ISPs and search engines to cooperate with right holders in the protection of the law of literary and artistic property on the internet".

Google expressed disappointment with the judgement.

"We are committed to helping content owners fight piracy across Google's tools, and we will continue to work with them so that they can make the best use of our state of the art copyright protection tools," the company said in a statement.

Despite the ruling, the film distribution studios who raised the action didn't get their own way across the board. The complainers had demanded that the search engines and ISPs foot the bill of the blocking and censorship, but the court decided otherwise.

“The cost of the measures ordered cannot be charged to the defendants who are required to implement them,” the decision reads.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the ISPs in question have two weeks to block the video streaming sites.

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