TV Group Couldn’t Force U.S. ISPs to Block Pirates, UK ISPs May Offer Help

In 2022, a group of Israel-based TV companies obtained a court order in the U.S. It compelled every ISP in the country to block three resilient pirate sites that blocking in Israel had failed to stop. Intervention by Cloudflare ended that dream and 2.5 years later, despite other measures targeting the sites, it appears that at least one is still going strong. The TV companies are now taking legal action against UK ISPs; they're unlikely to put up a fight, they may not even turn up in court.

More than two-and-a-half years ago, a group of Israel-based TV companies entered a new phase of their multi-year war against the country’s most popular and resilient pirate sites.

Companies including United King Film Distribution, Keshet Broadcasting, Hot Telecommunications Systems, and Reshet Media, requested a broad injunction at a federal court in the United States. The targets were three popular and highly-resilient pirate streaming sites; Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv, and Sdarot.tv, at the time Israel’s most-visited pirate site.

Blocking orders previously obtained in Israel had failed to put the platforms out of business. In the United States, the companies simply requested three of the most oppressive injunctions ever seen in a piracy case, and surprisingly the court obliged.

All ISPs…and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today…or to be used in the future by the Defendants…by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems.
The injunctions also prevented CDN providers, DNS providers, domain companies, advertising services, financial institutions, and payment processors, from doing any business with the sites, ever. This unprecedented overreach provoked a significant reaction from Cloudflare and soon after the injunction was withdrawn.

TV Companies Try Their Hand at the High Court in London

While the Holy Grail of site-blocking injunctions ultimately proved elusive, other measures detailed in redacted or sealed court filings were eventually sanctioned in the United States. The nature of the measures is unknown but after being deployed for the last two-and-a-half years, most likely at great expense, the job still isn’t done.

In today’s shape-shifting world of self-resurrecting pirate sites, and clone sites that effectively mimic fallen originals, it’s difficult to say whether the various Sdarot-branded platforms online today are connected to the original or not. Israel TV, on the other hand, is an IPTV subscription platform with a style of business that’s more difficult to mimic, at least convincingly so.

The TV companies and the site are by now sworn enemies. The former doggedly refuses to give up and the latter bluntly refuses to give in. News of action at the High Court in London therefore suggests a new battleground is about to emerge.

Filed on December 24, 2024, the action sees United King Film Distribution, Keshet Broadcasting, Hot Telecommunications Systems, and Reshet Media, facing off against the UK’s largest internet service providers; British Telecommunications, EE, Plusnet, Sky UK, Talktalk, and Virgin Media Limited.

With no pirate sites mentioned at this stage but all other tell-tale signs present, this is unmistakably an application for a blocking injunction under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

An Interesting Coincidence

What the Israeli companies have in mind isn’t entirely clear beyond the basics, and details are unlikely to arrive in the public domain for quite some time. Yet coincidentally or not, during the last few weeks an unusual listing appeared on freelancing platform, Upwork, that may shine some light on current planning.

Placed by a small IT company reportedly doing business in New York, which to date has spent $196K on 261 hires (67 active), the listing requests very specific information of the type typically required as part of a S97 application.

Upwork Listing
upwork-israeltv
The item listed as ‘Task #2’ also fits neatly into a hypothetical scenario of this exercise being connected to an application for a blocking injunction. The TV company applicants have already shown considerable determination in their pursuit of Moonpay.

On reading the text, whoever won the contract for the work seems to have been advised that a particular outcome is a necessity; i.e this report should include a more specific transfer to their processing domain called billnet domain and more importantly to show that billnet always transfers to moonpay.com

In the unlikely event that a Section 97A order under copyright law would also instruct the blocking of a payment provider, showing that all of an infringer’s business can be attributed to a single processor might be quite useful. The text at the end (emphasis ours) may or may not be a reference to that but if such an order was made under copyright law, it would be the first of its type, at least as far as we’re aware.

Significantly Easier Than the U.S.

For the last 14 years or so, rightsholders have obtained blocking injunctions against broadly the same ISPs, hoping to reduce the availability of pirated content in the UK. The major Hollywood studios, major record labels, and to a lesser extent publishers, are adamant that site-blocking works. Yet in most months, new blocks targeting hundreds of domains are urgently pushed through in response to the latest pirate countermeasures.

The ISPs’ familiarity with this process is a big plus for the Israeli companies. Unless there’s a glaring issue that needs to be addressed, it’s likely they’ll receive no opposition from the ISPs; after all, several are TV companies who also wish to restrict infringement.

If recent history is any barometer, the ISPs may not even attend court. In that respect, they’ll probably have something in common with Israel TV.