Hollywood Pushes to Expand Swedish Pirate Bay Blockade

Several major Hollywood studios including Disney, Universal Studios and Warner Bros, have teamed up with Swedish movie outfits to expand the local Pirate Bay blockade. The film companies want Telia, Sweden’s largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay, Dreamfilm, Nyafilmer, and Fmovies, as soon as possible.

Last year, the Swedish Patent and Market Court of Appeal ordered local Internet provider Bredbandsbolaget to block The Pirate Bay and streaming site Swefilmer.

While having the notorious torrent site blocked on its home turf was seen as a major success, the ruling only covered a subsection of Swedish Internet subscribers.

This week, a coalition of major film companies hopes to broaden the scope. The Swedish Film Industry, Nordisk Film, Disney Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, Warner Bros. and several other companies are taking Internet provider Telia to court.

Through the lawsuit filed on Monday and picked up by Ny Teknik, they request Sweden’s largest Internet provider to block access to a range of pirate sites. This includes The Pirate Bay, Dreamfilm, Nyafilmer, and Fmovies, as well as several related proxies and mirror sites.

“Telia currently provides its subscribers with unrestricted access to these illegal services, thereby enabling these illegal services to utilize Telia’s Internet service to infringe the rights of rights-holders and others,” the complaint reads.

The movie companies estimate that Telia has a market share of roughly 36% of all Swedish Internet subscribers. They add that the ISP has the means to block these infringing sites, which would be both proportional and effective, in line with EU regulation.

While this isn’t the first blocking lawsuit in Sweden, the movie companies are taking a slightly different approach this time.

In their complaint they ask for a preliminary ruling, so the blockades can be implemented before the case is fully litigated. This is similar to what Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN did last year in the Netherlands.

The movie companies already list dozens of domain names in their filing but also request the option to add new ones should any appear in the future. They, therefore, request a blocking request against the pirate services as a whole, not limited to the domains that are in use now.

Without this option “the rights holders will have to burden the legal system with repeated blocking requests if and when the operators behind the illegal services change domain names,” the film industry companies argue.

At the time of writing Telia has not responded to the allegations yet. When copyright holders asked the ISP to block The Pirate Bay last year, it said it would only do so following a court order.

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A copy of the complaint, in Swedish, is available here (pdf).