French Court had asked the Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to de-list many pirate websites from their search results.
According to the TorrentFreak report, the case dates back to December 2011 when many associations related to the film and TV companies’ complaint targeted 16 domains connected to the popular Allostreaming, Fifostream and DPstream video portals to force the world’s largest search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – to completely delist the sites from their search results and to have local ISPs block them.
High Court of Paris ruled that the film industry had clearly demonstrated that the sites in question are “dedicated or virtually dedicated to the distribution of audiovisual works without the consent of their creators,” thus violating their copyrights.
As a result the search services of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and local company Orange are now under orders to “take all necessary measures to prevent the occurrence on their services of any results referring to any of the pages” on these sites.
The tech companies may ask the plaintiffs in the case to cover the cost of the ban.
The ban must be in place within two weeks and will last one year.
The court ruled that copyright holders could ask for the list of violators to be updated, but only a judge could make the final ruling.
While courts have previously ordered Internet access providers to block targeted websites before, “this is the first time search engines have been ordered to de-list pirate websites and it is a crucial step towards respecting the law on the Internet,” a group of bodies representing film producers and distributors said in a statement.
