Early April, Belgian media reported new pirate IPTV blocking under a new court obtained by DAZN and 12th Player. Described as “the first of its kind,” DNS providers reportedly faced fines of €100,000 per day for non-compliance. Soon after, OpenDNS left Belgium, a replay of its earlier departures from both France and Portugal. Hailed as a “real step forward” against piracy but no mention of a third loss to DNS, the order also contains an apparent secret sauce.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
When site-blocking is publicized by those who acquire an injunction, attention tends to be carefully drawn towards key messaging.
Being seen to take action against piracy is a public reminder to pirate sites and suppliers that rightsholders are always watching. At the top of the supply chain that’s unlikely to act as a deterrent but lower down, where resellers and the public are much more exposed, even a pause for thought could prove useful.
In broad terms, anti-piracy announcements in this context are more easily framed as regular advertising. New and improved, whatever couldn’t be wiped away last time will now meet our toughest formula yet. So capitulate now, because we are going nowhere.
Blocking in Belgium
News of yet another blocking order in Belgium early April, obtained by DAZN and 12th Player, arrived via local media. No misdirection, just facts that combined to form an interesting, credible account of progress via a new type of injunction.
Notable was a not-so-veiled warning for DNS providers. Among the few details of the order made public was confirmation that it included penalties of €100,000 per day for any DNS provider that failed to prevent access to around 100+ streaming sites. Having responded to similar orders to block DNS in France and Portugal by leaving those countries, OpenDNS left Belgium too.
The new order was described as “the first of its kind,” and a “real step forward” in the fight against piracy. But was that the work of the marketing department or a measured fact-based assessment?
Court Order RR/25/00020: Game Changer or the Same Game?
Filed on March 25, 2025, by S.R.L. The 12th Player and DAZN Limited at the Chamber of Presidential Competence in Brussels, the petition for ISP and third-party DNS blocking establishes the fundamentals on well-trodden ground.
The applicants hold the necessary rights to the content in question and to a background of rising infringement in Belgium and an alleged piracy rate nearing 50%, they requested an order to disrupt the supply of infringing content.
The subsequent order dated March 28, 2025, spends almost no time on the first group of respondents; local ISPs VOO, Orange Belgium, Proximus, Telenet, and DIGI Communications Belgium. With their cooperation already established, the Court describes how users turn to alternative DNS providers to circumvent the ISPs’ blocking measures.
[T]he Complainants rightly argue that in order for domain name blocking measures to be effective, it is essential to target not only Internet access providers, but also providers of alternative domain name resolution systems providing their services in Belgium. Legal doctrine and case law confirm that the notion of intermediary is broadly defined.
The intermediaries in question – Cloudflare, Google LLC and Google Ireland Ltd, Cisco Systems and Cisco OpenDNS – form the second category of respondents. It’s understood that Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco opposed their involvement in the petition on various grounds. The specifics are absent from the order but suffice to say, all objections against blocking were rejected.
The Proposed Measures
DAZN’s claim that the order is a “real step forward” is supported by permission from the Court to compel blocking by third party DNS services. This type of blocking has been ordered previously, notably against Cloudflare in Italy and more recently at the request of Canal+ in France, but as a mainstream tool it’s still in its infancy.
History has shown that having gained momentum in one or two key member states, measures like these spread more quickly to others in the bloc. Approval in Belgium makes that much more likely.
Belgium already has experience of so-called ‘static blocking’ against stationary targets but is a relative newcomer to the ‘dynamic blocking’ requested here. Injunctions like these bake in flexibility from the start in preparation for various pirate countermeasures.
As clarified in the order: “The aim is to target not only the domain names identified in the request, but also any domain names circumventing the blocking measures, via redirects and/or mirror sites and/or ‘copycats’. The blocking measures will therefore be regularly updated.”
Confidential Pirate Trademarks
Attention then turns to a ‘confidential’ aspect of the order dealing with the issue of blocking sites based on their appearance.
More specifically, sites that lack an individual identity of their own but gain popularity through the use of ‘pirate trademarks’, usually familiar logos and/or domains containing recognizable site names.
Already part of injunctions in countries including the UK and Australia, targeting new sites based on their use of already familiar ‘pirate’ brands, usually offering the same content, took a surprisingly long time to arrive.
An inevitable response to some piracy groups turning to mass production of sites to frustrate blocking, mitigate search engine downranking, and in some cases to usurp trust in another brand for malicious purposes, brand-based blocking can suppress a range of time-consuming irritants.
Brand-blocking wasn’t advertised as a plus by DAZN but as part of a package, it does indeed amount to another step forward.
The Balance of Interests
With events currently playing out in Spain suggesting that basic rights and freedoms exist only with caveats, faith may need to be restored in balance of interests tests.
That being said, the Court indicates “that after weighing up the interests, rights and freedoms at stake, including the general interest, the facts and, where applicable, the documents on which the applicant relies are such as to reasonably justify the provisional measures requested.”
The Court arrived at the following conclusions:
• Users are in no way deprived of access to the content concerned on legal offers;
• Blocking targets are structurally infringing and do not host any legal content;
• The blocking measures requested constitute a proportionate and effective response
• Impact of measures limited to the violations observed
Blocking Notices
Anyone visiting one of the blocked sites within the court’s jurisdiction should be diverted to a blocking page. The page should provide information to explain why a visit to a pirate site didn’t produce the expected result.
Pirate site redirects should lead to a government website, but in some cases users may find themselves worrying about attackers instead.
How many visitors see the official piracy warning rather than a broken website is unknown; the same certificate issue has persisted for several weeks, leading to a warning that the government’s website could steal citizens’ personal information.
Those who look a little closer might notice that the server has been given a fun name to brighten visitors’ days. Or maybe it’s a cunning way to boost trademark awareness; we may never know. In any event, duties to address these issues are clearly allocated, so along with being monitored, there’s much to draw comfort from.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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