While the U.S. doesn’t have a dedicated site blocking law yet, it is certainly possible to take out pirate sites and services through court-ordered injunctions.

A recent federal lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court, shows that this can result in a sweeping piracy blocking that does real damage to the targeted platforms.

The case was originally filed by the Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision ( TU ) in early June. The case was relatively targeted, naming the IPTV services Thunder TV, Sunset TV, Pop TV, Kaelus TV, and Tele Latino, as well as their alleged operators.

The broadcaster argued that these pirate IPTV services threatened its business. TU holds the World Cup rights for sixteen Latin American territories, and its license with FIFA requires it to keep the Mexican broadcast signal from reaching the United States. The pirate services, it argued, put it in breach of that contract, exposing it to “termination and forfeiture of hundreds of millions of dollars in payments.”

To stop this immediate threat, the company requested a temporary restraining order, hoping to shut down the IPTV services effective immediately.

Judge Kathleen Williams granted the temporary restraining order on June 5, one day after the case was filed, without hearing from any of the defendants. The initial order prohibited the defendants from infringing TU’s own copyrighted works, which include telenovelas and other programming, and from using its trademarks, including all content linked to its licensed World Cup broadcast.

Importantly, the order also targeted third parties acting “in active concert,” including ISPs, hosts, CDNs, domain registrars, registries, app stores, ad networks, social platforms, search engines, and payment processors. These were ordered, on TU’s request and with notice, to disable the listed domains and IP addresses and unmask whoever was behind them.

The order specifically names various intermediaries such as Cloudflare, Namecheap, and GoDaddy, and directed financial players to take action. Mexican bank BBVA Bancomer and the payment channel Spin by OXXO were ordered to freeze funds and disclose the identities behind the accounts.

On July 24, Judge Williams converted the TRO into a preliminary injunction. By then the order had grown into something far larger than the case that started it, and that could only be the beginning, as the injunction appears to be self-expanding by nature, in multiple ways.

Injunction Covers Future Targets

While the injunction is noteworthy for many reasons, the most striking feature is that it’s specifically written to include things that don’t yet exist.

That starts with the content it protects. The order isn’t limited to TU’s current catalog or the World Cup rights, it covers the infringement of “any copyrighted works or broadcasts that Plaintiffs may in the future produce, license, or acquire rights to transmit.”

In other words, it covers future copyrights that did not exist when the order was signed.

The same applies to the pirate services themselves. The injunction defines its target as the named IPTV operations “and any comparable system,” whether “currently in existence or developed in the future,” and it applies “regardless of the branding, domain name, or technical configuration used.”

This effectively covers a pirate site or service that hasn’t launched, under a brand that is currently unknown, on a domain name that hasn’t been registered yet. As long as TU says it carries its pirated content, it can be targeted.

The injunction goes beyond pirate streaming targets too and specifically notes that the BitTorrent protocol and other content devivery categories are also included.

Self-Expanding Without a Judge

The injunction does have more novel characteristics. For example, one of the clauses allows TU’s lawyers to add these additional targets by filing a sworn declaration, without needing approval from a judge.

“Plaintiffs may supplement Schedule A by filing a verified declaration identifying additional infringing services, IP addresses, domains, applications, or platforms, which supplementation shall take effect immediately upon filing and service,” the injunction reads.

This effectively makes it a dynamic injunction, instead of a fixed one. Rightsholders have obtained dynamic blocking orders for years in the UK, Spain, and elsewhere in the EU, but for the United States this is new.

The broadcaster has already used the power twice. A first supplementation was filed on June 12. A second, filed on July 10, added an entire tier of piracy brands that were never named as defendants: XuperTV, Tarjeta Roja, Pirlo TV, Roja Directa, RBTV, Strikeout, and StudioMax.

Domain Registrars Suspend Domains

While the injunction covers a wide range of intermediaries, including Internet providers, it has not been used as a typical ISP site blocking order. Instead, it appears to be used mostly to target domain registrars and Cloudflare.

To get an idea of the effect this had, TorrentFreak ran a WHOIS check on many of the targeted domains this week.

Of 474 domains queried, 203 have a clientHold status , indicating that the registrars suspended these. One domain was suspended by the registry and the rest of the domains were not suspended.

Which registrars complied is largely explained by the location of the registrars. U.S.-facing registrars acted on nearly everything, with NameCheap and GoDaddy taking action on most domains.

Meanwhile, the domains that were left untouched are linked to foreign registrars, including Russia’s REGTIME-SU and the Dutch company Registrar.eu, which both hadn’t suspended a single listed domain according to our information.

This is the expected shape of the result rather than a failure of it. An order that binds “all persons in active concert” still depends, in practice, on whether the party served answers to a U.S. court. Where the registrar does, the domain goes dark. Where it doesn’t, it stays up.

The timing of the suspensions makes sense too. More than 90% of the suspended domains were updated during either the days around the June 5 restraining order, or the days after the July 24 injunction.

It is worth stressing that in addition to domain suspensions, the services may have also gone offline because other parts of their infrastructure were hit. That includes the hosting services that are listed in the injunction, as well as Cloudflare.

A Dedicated Cloudflare Section

Cloudflare stands out as the only intermediary to receive its own tailored rules, detailed in several pages of the order.

The company is directed to disable its CDN, reverse-proxy, and DNS service for a long list of domains within 24 hours. It must also hand over origin-server IP addresses, DNS records, account holder names, payment details, and 14 days of request logs for the targeted domains.

In addition, Cloudflare must check whether any other account in its system shares an email address or billing name with a flagged account, and to unmask those accounts too.

Cloudflare did secure some limits. It only has to produce data it already holds, it has no duty to monitor content, and its compliance is not an admission of liability. This is similar to the “no fault” injunctions we see in Europe.

Dropped Hosting Companies and More Intermediaries

When the complaint was filed early June, it also named the hosting companies Enzu, Dash Networks, DigitalOcean, and HostGator as defendants. All four were targeted by the restraining order, but they were voluntarily dismissed after less than two weeks.

Beyond these, the injunction named dozens of other intermediaries, from registrars and hosts in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Iceland, and Iran, to mainstream services such as GitHub, Akamai, and Linode. They are all named because they allegedly provided services to the pirate operations.

As far as we can see, none of the defendants, operators or intermediaries, ever appeared in court to object.

The broad injunction remains valid until the case is decided, and TU can keep adding names, brands, and domains to it for at least two years. Whether there will be any transparency regarding these seemingly unlimited expansions is not immediately clear from the legal paperwork.

—

A copy of the preliminary injunction, issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf) . Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett’s Report and Recommendation can be found here (pdf) , and the original June 5 temporary restraining order here (pdf) .

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.