In the UK, the High Court has ordered British Telecom to block access to a site which shares links to copyrighted content. From Screen Daily:

In a verdict widely welcomed by the UK film industry, the UK’s High Court has ruled in favour of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in their bid to block pirate website Newzbin2.The UK High Court handed down its judgment this morning, ruling that the MPA, supported by the creative industries, has won an order requiring Internet Service Provider (ISP) BT to block access to the pirate site, which has a membership of more than 700,000 and generates £1m+ per year for its operators.The case is the first to use Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act to call for direct action by ISPs to prevent infringement using their services.

This is such a tough one to oppose, but it is important to do so. As Dan Foster noted in the July 18 National Review, proponents of the New York public-smoking ban tend to presume that those against the law must inevitably be smokers; as if the only reason one might oppose such regulation is self-interest. This reflexive rush to identity politics is instructive here. Internet regulation is a topic in which it is almost impossible to get the public interested, not just because it deals with the workings of a complex system which most take entirely at face value, but because the few cases on the edge of the slippery slope deal largely with prosecuting those for whom there is little sympathy, most notably child pornographers. To oppose government regulation of the Internet can be misconstrued as supporting those who would use it for ill. The flagrant hypocrisy of my generation’s attitude towards intellectual property notwithstanding, it is very hard to get even the most prolific downloader to come out and defend copyright infringement.

The issue here, however, is not copyright infringement, but the freedom of the Internet from government control. And the problem — as always — is that once such a precedent is set, it can be utilized in other ways. (Especially as this precedent was established in a court ruling through common law.)

There is no guarantee that the list of sites which BT is proscribed from allowing access to will not grow, nor that the reasons for such prohibition will not be expanded. The British government now has a list to which it can add with impunity. Given the recent tendencies to curb freedom of speech, generally in the name of protecting people from “being offended,” this should worry anyone interested in free expression. If the British government can arrest those who burn the Quran, or arrest a preacher for publicly criticising homosexuality, then why should not websites which criticize these things be shut down too? There are many websites which undoubtedly contravene the specious Racial & Religious Hatred Act of 2006. Ugly and unwelcome as racists and religious bigots are, do we really want the state deciding what can be said and what cannot? It is not too tendentious to suggest that if the British anti-hate speech laws were to be enforced at the service provider level, BT would also have to block access to YouTube’s comments.

BT fought the good fight, and have been among the strongest critics of the increasing attempts to regulate access to the internet in the UK. Most importantly, they noted that:.

they are mere passive recipients of infringing activity, they had no actual knowledge of infringement and shouldn’t be required to act beyond taking steps to prevent a particular infringement by a particular user and that blocking cannot be ordered as it amounts to a general obligation to monitor.

Copyright infringement is, of course, illegal. But this decision goes after the wrong party. As the article notes, “the pirate site . . . has a membership of more than 700,000 and generates £1m+ per year for its operators.” There is the problem. To go after the access provider is a severe case of shooting the messenger, and if the slow erosion of free speech in Britain is anything to go by, the charges against said messenger are sure to increase.