Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
The High Court has granted rights holders, such as Columbia Pictures and others, more flexibility to require the UK’s major broadband ISPs (e.g. BT, EE, Plusnet, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband and TalkTalk) to block customers from accessing websites that have been found to facilitate internet copyright infringement (piracy).
At present ISPs subject to blocking orders, which in the UK usually flow from Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA), have over the past 16 years or so become very common. Hundreds of sites have been blocked through this approach (thousands if you include their many proxies and mirrors), which usually include file sharing (P2P / Torrent), streaming sites, Sci-Hub and those that sell counterfeit goods etc.
Since then, we’ve also seen similar kinds of restrictions being imposed via some third-party Domain Name System (DNS) providers and efforts have also been made to target Virtual Private Networks (VPN) in some countries, as well as CDN providers and internet search engines etc. But keeping up with the ability of serious copyright infringers to rapidly change websites remains a common and often costly problem.
However, the new ruling – ‘Columbia Pictures and others v British Telecommunications and others’ (Case ID: IL-2025-000240), which has not yet been published in public, appears to represent a new generation of UK blocking orders that ISPs will soon need to contend with.
According to the MPA and TorrentFreak, it allows Columbia Pictures, Disney, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Universal City Studios and Warner Bros (claimants in the case) to seek blocking of any “structurally infringing audiovisual piracy services that meet defined criteria, without having to bring a fresh court application for each new domain or site name available in the future … This is particularly important where piracy operators use generic, descriptive, or frequently changing names to avoid being captured by brand-based or domain-specific orders“.
MPA Summary
The Court accepted that this broader form of relief was necessary and proportionate in light of the scale and evolving nature of the problem of online infringements, the operational burden of repeated applications, and the demonstrated responsible use of site blocking remedies by rights holders over many years.
The order has a duration of 6 months and can be extended also depending on an ex-post reporting obligation, requiring rights holders to submit to the Court information on implementation and effectiveness, thereby preserving judicial oversight and accountability. This type of order does not require expanding intermediary liability but rather ensuring that existing no-fault injunction mechanisms remain practically effective in rapidly evolving online environments.
This development is particularly relevant in light of recent changes in the technical and operational behavior of piracy operators. While fully autonomous “agentic AI” systems are not yet known to be widely used in the piracy ecosystem, several technological developments are already materially lowering the barriers to large-scale domain hopping and evasive schemes, so that pirate operators can now rapidly deploy cloned streaming sites using openly available codebases and low-cost automated domain registration systems, often combined with bulk registration APIs and redirect-based migration strategies.
As a result, infringing services increasingly operate through rotating networks of domains, including generic or non-brand-related names specifically designed to evade traditional domain-specific or brand-based blocking measures. In some cases, operators maintain multiple interchangeable domains with substantially identical infrastructure, content libraries and functionality, allowing users to be seamlessly redirected to replacement domains.
Essentially, the new approach is much more automated and appears to cut out a fair bit of the process cost, at least for Rights Holders, in order to deliver both more rapid blocking and even unblocking, where needed. But it’s difficult to know how far this goes without being able to see a copy of the final legal text, and what, if any, safeguards might be in place to reduce the risk of accidental overclocking (lack of transparency).
Admittedly, this is still very much a game of whack-a-mole for Rights Holders, but the new order may help them to keep pace.