The UK High Court just handed Hollywood and the MPA one of the broadest pirate site blocking orders the country has ever issued, and the studios no longer have to come back to court every time they want a new domain blocked.

The case, Columbia Pictures and others v British Telecommunications and others, was filed in December 2025 and decided on May 7, 2026.

Columbia and other studios were represented by Wiggin, with major UK ISPs named as defendants. The order runs for six months and can be renewed if the studios file implementation reports with the court.

Why This Pirate Site Blocking Order Is Different

Past Section 97A orders forced studios to name every specific domain. A 2022 ruling stretched coverage to “pirate brands” so mirrors and copycats got swept in too.

This new order goes further. It targets any ‘structurally infringing audiovisual piracy service’ that meets the court’s criteria, no matter what the domain is called.

The MPA argued operators now rely on bulk domain registration APIs and rotating networks of generic, non-branded domains built to slip past traditional blocking. Studios also warned the court that “agentic AI” tools could accelerate domain-hopping even further.

Honestly, you can see why Hollywood pushed for a blocking order that skips the courtroom on every new URL.

What U.S. and EU Cord-Cutters Should Expect

The same playbook is showing up everywhere. A new WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement paper (PDF) frames site blocking as useful but limited, with rights holders pulling CDNs, search engines, DNS providers, and registrars into the mix alongside ISPs.

In the U.S., Trump’s film tariff sparked a fresh push for site-blocking legislation, and the EU’s updated 2025 piracy watchlist is already being used to pressure intermediaries across Europe.

UK readers feeling this first should know a VPN is the standard workaround. It encrypts your DNS requests and routes traffic through a server outside the ISP’s blocklist, which is why VPN signups spike in every country that rolls out one of these orders. See our VPN rankings for current picks.

We have watched this fight play out for years. Blocking rarely kills piracy. It pushes users toward VPNs and rotating mirror domains that route around DNS-level controls.

Final Thoughts from Troy

Letting Hollywood add domains to a UK blocklist without judicial review on each one is a serious due-process shift.

Ironically, the rotating-domain pirates this order targets are the ones least likely to care, while everyday cord-cutters lose any visibility into what’s blocked and why.

For more details on this story, refer to the report from TorrentFreak and the official documentation (PDF).

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