Singapore High Court orders blocking of movie piracy site Solarmovie

SINGAPORE – The Singapore High Court has ordered Network Service Providers Singtel, Starhub, M1, MyRepublic and ViewQuest to block the piracy site Solarmovie.ph, which features links to the latest Hollywood movies and TV shows, by March 17. 

The order was made following an application by the Motion Picture of America's (MPA) member studios under new site-blocking provisions in Singapore’s Copyright Act which came into force in December 2014.

These provide for a process by which the copyright owners, exclusive licensees and performers can obtain "blocking orders" against flagrantly infringing websites without having to first establish an NSP's liability for copyright infringement.

In a Client Alert, lawyers Baker & McKenzie say that the granting of the site blocking order against Solarmovie and the short timeframe taken for the order to be made (about two months) will likely encourage more rights holders to seek this remedy.

“As we know, such offending websites can migrate between domain names with relative ease. so the effectiveness of the new framework in addressing online piracy remains to be seen,” B&M says.

“The challenge will be whether the present framework is flexible enough to allow rights owners to overcome migration and avoidance techniques which the offending websites are likely to adopt.´ www.bakermckenzie.com (ATI).