📰 New article from TorrentFreak
Hollywood Secures Broad “Omnibus” Pirate Site Blocking Order in UK High Court
### Hollywood’s New “Whack-a-Mole” Strategy
If you thought the battle between Hollywood and pirate sites was already a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole, get ready for the difficulty setting to crank up to “Expert.”
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has reportedly secured a massive new “omnibus” blocking order from the UK High Court. In the past, studios had to play a tedious game of legal catch-up: identify a specific pirate domain, file a court application, and ask ISPs to block it. It was slow, expensive, and—to be honest—a bit ineffective against sites that change names every five minutes.
This new ruling changes the rules of engagement. Instead of targeting specific names or even “pirate brands,” studios can now seek to block any service that meets certain “structural infringement” criteria. Essentially, if a site looks and acts like it’s hosting stolen content, it can be added to the blocklist without the studios needing to file a fresh application for every new domain.
The MPA argues this is necessary to combat “agentic AI” and automated tools that allow pirates to spin up entire networks of mirror sites in seconds. However, there’s a catch: the full text of the order hasn’t been made public yet, leaving much to speculation regarding how much oversight—and transparency—will actually exist when these lists are updated behind closed doors.