Sony must pay the BBC £5m after the High Court found it failed to prevent a warehouse containing about £40m-worth of DVDs and CDs from being burnt down during the London riots.

The Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation owned and occupied the warehouse in Enfield, north London, where it stored more than seven million CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs for 2 Entertain Video, a subsidiary of the public broadcaster’s commercial arm BBC Studios.

During the widespread civil unrest following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by Metropolitan police officers in August 2011, a group of young men broke into the warehouse through a fire door and looted some goods before setting it alight with two petrol bombs.

The fire, which burned for 10 days, destroyed the warehouse and all its contents.

BBC Studios and 2 Entertain, which are responsible for the BBC’s video catalogue and new release stock, sued Sony for loss of profits and business interruption costs as a result of the fire.

They claimed the firm failed to keep its goods secure as a result of “poor security” and “inadequate fire precautions”.

Giving judgment on Friday, Mrs Justice O’Farrell ruled that they were entitled to £5m in damages plus interest as a result of Sony’s failures to install sprinklers or protect the “obvious weak point” in the warehouse’s security.

She said: “Adequate security measures that could have been taken by Sony probably would have deterred or delayed the attack on the warehouse and prevented the youths from gaining entry.

“Reasonable fire precautions, namely, the installation of sprinklers, probably would have suppressed the fire and significantly reduced any damage to the warehouse and its stock.”

The judge said the warehouse was destroyed in “an opportunistic attack on an unoccupied building that was accessible from a public path”.

She said the fire exit door and security grilles “offered almost no resistance to the short attack by youths armed with no more than a few garden implements”, who were able to enter the building “in less than one minute”.

Mrs Justice O’Farrell added that previous break-ins, including an April 2010 burglary in which more than 1,700 Blu-ray copies of the film Avatar were stolen, should have “put Sony on notice that a security review should be carried out, the risks should be assessed, and additional security measures introduced”.

The judge also rejected Sony’s contention that the destruction of the warehouse was an “event beyond its control”, finding that “the risk of intruders was foreseeable” because previous break-ins “had been attempted and/or achieved during incidents that occurred prior to the riot”.