Big Content has won a ruling forcing BT to block access to a website which the movie business claims is a pirate site.

The Motion Picture Association, the trade body whose members include Warner Bros, Fox, Disney and Paramount Pictures, has been granted an order requiring BT  to block its customers' access to the website Newzbin2. Justice Arnold in his ruling at the high court in London said that it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes.

BT knows that the users of Newzbin2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin2, Arnold added. BT had argued that forcing it to ban its 6 million UK customers from accessing a website would usher in a new wave of online censorship.