Hollywood's site blocking bill builds a court process most blocked sites will never attend

Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act on 29 January 2025. The Copyright Alliance, welcoming it the same day, identified it as H.R. 791 and thanked the House Judiciary Committee's intellectual property subcommittee chairman Darrell Issa for his support. Most coverage since has treated the bill as a return of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which collapsed in 2012. The text is not the same, and the differences are the part worth reading.

As described by TorrentFreak on the day of introduction, the bill sets out a staged court process. A copyright owner files a petition in a United States district court. The petitioner must notify the foreign site operator and the service providers concerned. The court reviews the petition for evidence of infringement. The operator then has 30 days to contest a preliminary order. If the order stands, the petitioner moves for a blocking order, and the court must satisfy itself that the block will not interfere with lawful content. Service providers have 15 days to implement a final order. Orders are to be publicly accessible immediately on issue, and providers are shielded from liability for complying. The obligations fall on large internet service providers and on DNS resolvers, with resolvers earning less than 100 million dollars a year excluded.

Lofgren said the proposal was the product of more than a year of work with the technology, film and television industries, and offered "a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free internet except for the infringers". Motion Picture Association chief executive Charles Rivkin called it "an effective tool to combat offshore piracy". Copyright Alliance chief executive Keith Kupferschmid said his organisation appreciated Lofgren's work on the issue.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's objection, published on 2 April 2025, is not that the procedure is missing. It is that the procedure will usually run empty. "Most cases would be decided in ex parte proceedings, with no one there to defend the site being blocked," the group wrote. That is a prediction about who shows up rather than a claim about the statute, and it is consistent with the bill's own premise, which is that the operators are offshore and beyond ordinary process. EFF also argued that blocking is "both dangerously blunt and trivially easy to evade", that "determined evaders can create the same content on a new domain within hours", and that users hit by a block "often have no idea what happened". Public Knowledge called the bill censorious. The Re:Create coalition said it would hand "Big Content the internet killswitch it has sought for decades".

The collateral damage argument has measurements behind it. Cloudflare's Marwan Fayed, writing on 16 December 2022, reported that of more than 6.5 million internet resources caught by Russian IP blocking, 6,335,850, or 97 per cent, were blocked collaterally. In Austria in 2022, blocking 11 IP addresses to reach 14 websites made thousands of sites unreachable for two days. Cloudflare's survey of more than 255 million domain names found a global ratio of 16 domain names to each IP address, rising to 24 to one in Europe, and found that fewer than 10 IP addresses front roughly 51 million domains. FADPA is written around DNS and ISP blocking rather than IP blocking, but the same concentration question sits underneath any infrastructure level remedy.

The DNS resolver obligation is not hypothetical elsewhere. TorrentFreak reported on 12 December 2024 that the Paris Judicial Court had issued three orders under Article L.333-10 of the French Sports Code requiring resolvers to block pirate sports streaming sites. Quad9 and Vercara were named in all three, and Google in the rugby order. Quad9, which says it cannot determine user location for privacy reasons, said the block therefore applied to its users worldwide, and called the orders "DNS censorship" based on an "absurd" application of copyright law. That is the practical shape of a resolver order: a national court reaching a global resolver.

What has happened to the bill since is harder to establish than it should be. The congressional record for H.R. 791 could not be opened for this report, because congress.gov refused automated requests. None of the documents opened records a hearing, a mark up or a floor vote. The Copyright Alliance said on 29 January 2025 that it looked forward to working with Lofgren and Issa to advance the legislation during the 119th Congress. Whether that happened is not something this masthead can confirm from the sources it read.

The older lesson is that the industry has long had blocking tools available in the United States and has not used them. TorrentFreak reported on 8 October 2017 that studios had avoided court action against domestic ISPs, quoting former Recording Industry Association of America executive vice president Neil Turkewitz: "The legacy of SOPA is that copyright industries want to avoid resurrecting the ghosts of SOPA past." FADPA is an attempt to build a process those ghosts cannot haunt. Whether a process nobody attends is a process is the question Congress has not yet answered.