The French High Court in Paris just handed down a ruling that strikes a blow to freeloaders aplenty.
The court ordered search firms Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to ensure that a slew of video streaming sites are rendered inaccessible by preventing them from showing up in each service’s search results in France. French ISPs will also have to do their part to make sure that Internet users won’t be able to access these sites any longer.
The High Court said that the sites in question were “almost entirely dedicated” to streaming videos illegally and that they played a central part in the “distribution of works without consent of their creators.”
Once the ruling was handed down, those who represented the copyright holders stated that the High Court’s decision “recognised the merits of the approach [of] forcing ISPs and search engines to cooperate with right holders in the protection of the law of literary and artistic property on the internet.”
Here’s what Google had to say on the matter.
“We are committed to helping content owners fight piracy across Google’s tools, and we will continue to work with them so that they can make the best use of our state of the art copyright protection tools.”
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the ISPs in question have two weeks to block the video streaming sites.
