1oz61wa

Private Enforcement Actions
intermediaries; only the Department of Justice was permitted to serve such cease and desist orders on ISPs and
search engines.
15. Although some opponents of SOPA and PIPA expressed concern that the absence of a fee- or costshifting
provision in the bills would lead to large numbers of ruinously expensive actions against foreign
websites and intermediaries associated with them, the experience of EU courts in Article 8(3) cases does not
provide support for this concern. Although EU courts have so far refused to impose fee- or cost-shifting on a
plaintiff in such an action, the number of such actions and the apparent costs associated with them have both
been fairly modest to date. See, e.g., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation et al. v. British Telecommunications
PLC [2011] EWHC 2714 (Ch), [2012] 1 All E.R. 806, Case No. HC 10C04385 (26 Oct 2011) (available
at http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2011/
2714.html&query=Newzbin&method=boolean) (rejecting ISP’s demand that plaintiffs pay the costs associated
with the ISP’s compliance with the court’s site-blocking order).
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