Author: tio

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).

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

Although this version may be considered ‘minor’, it is every bit as significant as a major update in terms of its new features and the improvements made to the user experience.

Transferring a channel

Version 8 introduced the ability for multiple people to manage a channel. This new version adds the ability to transfer ownership to another account on the same platform.

Imagine that your passion for computing begins to fade, giving way to a growing interest in botany. Rather than letting your channel, which contains hundreds of still-relevant videos, fall into oblivion, why not transfer it to someone who will keep it alive and benefit from your existing audience?

If there were several editors managing this channel, they will remain in place after the transfer.

Watching a live stream on catch-up

Imagine you’re watching a live stream of your favourite comic artist, who’s about to make a big reveal about their next comic book, but unfortunately they’re dragging it out and your cat is meowing its head off to be let in (it’s an emergency, just like any other). Up until now, you would have had to switch to the mobile version to keep watching the live stream whilst going to let the cat in, who, on top of that, wants a bit of a scratch.

Now, you can simply pause to spend more time focusing on looking after the cat, and come back to pick up the live stream where you left off (especially as, of course, you paused just before the eagerly awaited reveal – typical).

And if, in the end, the artist carries on talking about something else for 10 minutes, you can catch up on what you’ve missed.

This option must be enabled by the platform administrator and then activated by the streamer. A big thank you to the contributor who initiated the development of this feature!

Director’s cut

PeerTube includes a mini video editor (‘Studio’) that lets you trim a video, add a watermark or add an intro/outro without using third-party software. Now you can also remove sections from the video!

Simply enter the start and end timestamps of the segment you wish to remove.

UX improvements

You can have the most powerful software in the world, but if you don’t pay attention to the user experience, nobody will use it. So what’s the point?

For PeerTube, we have been paying particular attention to making the interface and navigation clear for years, thanks, among other things, to the work of La Coopérative des Internets. This version brings several great improvements:

• Improvements to the video ownership transfer process:
  • a dedicated tab to view requests and changes made, with the option to process requests in batches
  • actions to transfer a video can now be found on its management page
  • quick actions for requests directly in notifications:
    

    

• Improvements of the player:
  • resolution and playback speed are saved in the browser’s memory
  • option to flip a video horizontally
  • new design for the video loading animation
• Major quality-of-life improvements for admins and moderators:
  • New, easier-to-use table filter
  • Batch acceptance/rejection of submissions
    

    

  • Filter by video status and videos from muted accounts
  • Addition of a badge if the video owner is muted by the platform
  • Improved display of blocked videos and batch processing (unblocking, deletion, etc.)
  • Improved display of reports (batch processing of internal rating updates, rejection or acceptance, deletion, etc.)
    

    

  • Improved display of comments for admins and users (click on an account to filter comments, addition of a badge if the account that commented on a video is muted at platform level, filter for comments from muted accounts, etc.)

And more

We are also delighted to welcome two new languages for the web interface: Korean and Romanian! A big thank you to the contributors who helped translate the software.

This is just a brief overview of the new features included in this release. You can find the full list of changes in the changelog, including the ability to view the number of downloads for your videos, podcast support for playlists, performance improvements, and of course bug fixes…

Thank you once again for your contributions, whether through code on the repository, or via your suggestions on the dedicated site, on our forum, or even your donations!

⚠️ If you are a platform administrator, please update to at least version 8.1.8 as soon as possible to protect yourself from a critical security vulnerability that was fixed in 8.1.6: version 8.1.8 addresses the exploitation of this vulnerability!

Please feel free to follow our accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky to stay up to date with the latest updates and news about the project!

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