Shutterstock

The five largest ISPs in the UK have been handed another blocking order by the High Court, this time mandating they restrict access to sites offering pirated ebooks for download. The action was brought about by the Publishers Association, an organisation representing more than 100 members in the publishing industry.

The ruling means BT, Virgin Media, Sky, EE, and TalkTalk must block customers from accessing seven sites: AvaxHome, Bookfi, Bookre Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap, and LibGen. The sites were said to offer more than ten million titles for download, more than 80 percent of which infringed copyright according to the PA. The trade body argued the ISPs have "actual knowledge" that subscribers were using the sites for illegal purposes.


Prior to the court proceedings, the PA had sent nearly one million takedown requests to the sites in question, and represented rights holders in asking Google to remove 1.75m URLs linking to illegally uploaded works. Many of the sites were reported to have indirectly monetised the ebooks offered, predominantly through onsite advertising.

While the move is only the latest in a string of High Court blocking orders, it's the first to come from the ebook and publishing industry. Most recently, the major British ISPs were forced to restrict access to sites offering the illegal streaming client Popcorn Time, in April. The sharing of digital books is especially hard to police though, the small file size making them even easier to share. Unlike physical books, ebooks legally sold in the UK are also subject to VAT, so the loss of revenue to the taxman from their theft is likely to have further weighed in on the High Court's decision.

. "Our members need to be able to protect their authors' works from such illegal activity; writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material," Mollet continued. "We are very pleased that the High Court has granted this order and, in doing so, recognises the damage being inflicted on UK publishers and authors by these infringing websites."


As with all such cases, the impact of blocking particular sites will be hard to measure. The titles are certainly available on other BitTorrent sites, as well as other platforms favoured by downloaders such as IRC. Blocking orders also historically do little to deter uploaders or the site runners, as proven by the numerous minor URL changes enacted by the likes of The Pirate Bay to circumvent them.

However, the Publishers Association is intent on more aggressively chasing authorial and publisher rights in future. It operates a Copyright Infringement Portal, allowing members to issue take down notices, and works with Operation Creative, run out of the City of London Police's IP crime unit PIPCU. It also works to stem physical piracy of books in markets including China, India, Brazil and Turkey.

In the meantime, those wanting some legal free ebooks should look into Project Gutenberg, an effort to digitise public domain texts for future posterity.