High Court: You've made our SH*T list – corked pirate torrent sites double in a day

Arrrr. Walk the crowded plank

The number of blacklisted torrent sites has doubled in Blighty after the High Court blocked a record number of piratical webpages.

Blighty's top six ISPs have been ordered to prevent access to 53 torrent services, bringing the total number of banned pages up to 93.

New sites on the list include BitSoup, IP Torrents, Isohunt, Sumotorrent, Torrentdb Torrentfunk and Rapid Moviez.

You may be surprised to see Isohunt on the list, because it was supposed to shut down last October. The torrent indexing site lost a court case against the The Motion Picture Association of America and was left with a preposterous $110m damages bill.

"Securing court orders requiring ISPs [internet service providers] to block access to illegal websites is an accepted and legitimate measure to tackle online copyright infringement," said Chris Marcich, president of the European division of the Motion Picture Association.

"It carefully targets sites whose sole purpose is to make money off the back of other people's content while paying nothing back into the legitimate economy."

It might look as if the waters around Britain have become too shark-infested for pirates to survive, but there are still many, many torrent sites out there.

As well as torrents, concerted pirates are also using cloud locker services, which are often totally beyond the reach of copyright police.

These work in a similar manner to Dropbox and allow pirates to upload content into the cloud. The address is then shared on forums, allowing huge numbers of people to download the content before the site's owners are even aware that illegal content is being stored on their servers.

Some cloud locker services are suspected of actively colluding with pirates and creaming off revenue from advertising, copyright cops once told us. ®