Out-foxing the Pirates? Foxtel and Village Roadshow launch legal action to block piracy sites in Australia

Foxtel and Village Roadshow are set to be the first companies to make use of the new website-blocking laws passed in June 2015 under the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act.

Village Roadshow has filed a case in the Federal Court, seeking to have the movie-piracy site “SolarMovie.ph.” blocked and Foxtel’s action targes the well-known piracy website ‘’The Pirate Bay’’, along with “TorrentHound”, “IsoHunt” and “Torrentz”.

Several large ISPs including Telstra are the respondents to the actions, and if the case is successful, they will face orders to block the relevant websites.

ISPs have been waiting for this since the laws were introduced.  In anticipation of such court action, several of Australia’s largest ISPs along with rights holders have been in discussions about the website blocking process, in an attempt to smooth out any disagreements over orders before the cases made it to court.

One key advantage of attacking piracy through the new legislation is that, rather than chasing individual pirates, rights holders will be able to focus on the point of distribution of pirated content.  It will be interesting to see how these cases pan out.

The first hearings for the cases are scheduled for early March.  We will keep you posted.