UK High Court Approves Omnibus Order for Piracy Site Blocking

U.K. High Court has issued an omnibus order that lets rights holders seek blocking of structurally infringing audiovisual piracy services meeting defined criteria without filing a new court application for each domain or site name. The order was granted in Columbia Pictures and others v British Telecommunications and others, a case filed in late 2025.

It will remain in effect for six months and can be extended under certain conditions.

Pirate operators have used APIs to register domains in bulk and rotate them to evade blocks while keeping the same infrastructure and content. K. Section 97A Copyright Act orders required rights holders to identify individual domains, and a 2022 ruling extended coverage to mirror sites and related brands.

Operators often hide behind fictitious or stolen identities and do not respond to cease-and-desist letters. Hosting servers are frequently located in countries where enforcement is difficult or shielded by anonymization.

The Motion Picture Association stated that site blocking by traditional ISPs produced an average 89 percent reduction in visits to targeted piracy sites between 2024 and 2025. Reductions exceeded 90 percent in Italy, France, Brazil, South Korea, and India during 2024.

” The MPA noted that agentic AI could make it easier for operators to evade blocks in the future. More than 60 countries currently maintain administrative or judicial site-blocking procedures.