The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has been the driving force behind pirate site blocking around the world for more than fifteen years.

With blocking powers in more than 50 countries, the group sees the enforcement option as a key anti-piracy tool that it hopes the United States will also adopt soon.

Last year, for example, the MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President Karyn Temple discussed an overview of site-blocking ‘best practices’ at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Among other things, this includes the inclusion of dynamic blocking, automated processes, all with proper safeguards.

For the upcoming 18th WIPO session next month, the MPA has also prepared a presentation on site blocking. Delfos Visser’s contribution discusses the role of intermediaries. This includes the gradually expanding role of ISPs, search engines, VPNs, DNS resolvers, domain name registrars, and content delivery networks.

The involvement of these intermediaries is regularly discussed, both in and outside of courts. However, the MPA’s presentation also includes a notable new site-blocking angle that has not been covered in the press, until now.

UK’s New ‘Omnibus’ Blocking Order

In his contribution, Delfos Visser highlights a new UK High Court ruling that has not yet been published publicly on BAILII or the National Archives. The case, Columbia Pictures and others v British Telecommunications and others , was filed in December 2025, seeking broader site-blocking powers in the UK.

The MPA notes that this case resulted in a new judgment on May 7, which will reportedly allow rightsholders to better respond to evolving piracy threats.

In the MPA’s framing, the ruling represents a new generation of UK blocking orders. Traditional applications under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 required studios to identify specific pirate sites by domain name and ask the court to order the major UK ISPs to block them.

A 2022 ruling by Mr. Justice Meade extended that to also include orders covering “pirate brands,” which allowed rightsholders to also target mirror and copycat domains with similar names.

The new order goes even further. According to the MPA, it allows Hollywood studios 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.”

The order remains in place for six months, with the option to request an extension. To qualify for a renewal, the studios are required to submit reports on the implementation and effectiveness to the court.

Shapeshifting & Agentic-AI-Powered Pirate Sites

The MPA presentation notes that these expanded blocking capabilities are much needed to be able to handle the ever-evolving piracy threats. Delfos Visser notes that this could include AI-amplified piracy tools in the future.

“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,” Delfos Visser writes.

The submission points out that services such as bulk registration APIs can make it easier for pirates to counter blockades. Operators can rapidly deploy new streaming sites and rotate through networks of new and non-brand-related domain names to evade standard blocking orders, the MPA writes.

“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,” Delfos Visser writes.

This framing matters, as traditional s.97A orders and the more recent pirate-brand orders both require some link between a target domain and a previously identified pirate operation. The new order, as suggested by the MPA, breaks that link. Sites can be added to the blocklist based on whether they meet structural-infringement criteria, not whether they share a name or branding with an existing target.

Limited Transparency

While this does indeed read like a significant court order, the full text remains unavailable. We reached out to Delfos Visser and Wiggin, the law firm that represented the studios in this case, but neither responded to our inquiry. None of the targeted ISPs have publicly mentioned the order either.

The ruling will eventually be published online, and we will update this article accordingly when that happens. However, going forward, it would be welcome to have more transparency from the get-go.

Questions also remain about the transparency of these types of court orders. TorrentFreak has previously documented how dynamic blocking orders are quietly updated to add new domains. This makes it hard for outsiders to check the accuracy of these measures.

This transparency concern will be further elevated when rights holders can add new domains to existing orders that seemingly have no link to the domains that were initially targeted.

The MPA does not address the transparency angle in its WIPO submission. Last year, however, the group told the same forum that it is “of paramount importance that site blocking injunctions are rendered in the most transparent way possible.” For now, the new UK order falls short of that standard.

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A copy of the MPA’s WIPO contribution, WIPO/ACE/18/26: Involvement of Intermediary Services in Site Blocking, is available here (pdf) .

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