Foxtel Just Blocked 28 More Torrent Sites In Australia

Back in February 2015, legislation was passed that allowed content rights holders to apply for an order to block websites that “facilitate piracy” in Australia.

Today at The Federal Court of Australia in Sydney, various internet service providers – from Telstra to TPG – were ordered to block 28 torrent sites including watchfreemovies and 123Hulu, within 15 business days.

Basically, the goal for Foxtel is to block Australians from accessing websites that infringe on its copyright by allowing unauthorised access to its intellectual property.

The 28 domains, including streaming and BitTorrent sites, were presented to the Federal Court back in May. Following hearings in April and June, the final judgement was delivered today at 12pm.

Back In 2017 the content provider successfully had 20 online services blocked.

Today, the following were added to the list along with various .net, .eu, .to etc variants:

123Hulu

1Movies>

5Movies

ETTV

iHDEuropix

HDO

NewEpisodes

MagnetDL

TorrentDownload

TorrentRoom

Torrents

SeriesTop

Sockshare

WatchFreeMovies

Watch32

Once a website is blocked, users who visit them will be hit with a landing page that warns them that the site cannot be accessed.

Some content rights holders, like Roadshow CEO Graham Burke, say the current laws don’t go far enough. On March 15 Burke penned a letter to the Department of Communications and the Arts, appealing for a review of the Copyright Online Infringement Amendment.

“With all major pirate sites blocked in Australia, the front door of the department store is shut. However, pirates, facilitated by Google and other search engines, are circumventing Australian Laws and Courts and opening a huge back door. By way of example, I attach page shots of Google searches, in most cases coming up with pirate links before a user even completes typing a search phrase,” Burke said.

“Australia needs the power to require Google and other search engines to take reasonable steps to stop facilitating searches which lead to pirate sites.”