Judicial blocking orders
Issa’s bill was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. Issa is the chair of a subcommittee on courts, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and the Internet.
The text of Issa’s “American Copyright Protection Act of 2026” is not on the congressional website yet, but it has been circulating, and Public Knowledge provided us with a copy. The bill proposes having courts issue site-blocking orders to ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services that have at least 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the US.
The bill specifies that blocking requirements would not apply to root nameserver operators and top-level domain registries. It would also exclude Wi-Fi networks offered on the premises of airports, libraries, restaurants, retail stores, and similar establishments.
Under Issa’s proposed system, a copyright owner could ask a court to issue a declaration that an online location is a “foreign piracy site” based on “a preponderance of the evidence” that it is a foreign site primarily designed for piracy. After a court makes that declaration, the copyright owner could petition for a court order requiring network operators to block the alleged piracy site.
Service providers would generally have 14 days to file objections, but judges would have authority to modify deadlines “to address time-sensitive events.” That provision would allow quicker blocking of websites that air pirated content live or within 24 hours of its release.
The Re:Create coalition said Issa’s bill would codify “a one-sided legal process modeled on European site-blocking laws, which have been shown to cause widespread censorship.”
“Forcing infrastructure providers, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to filter internet traffic threatens user privacy and risks catastrophic collateral damage to the open web,” Re:Create Executive Director Brandon Butler said. “This fast-track site-blocking scheme bypasses effective legal channels, undermines the digital ecosystem, invites copyright abuse—disrupting small businesses, nonprofit and Internet users across the globe.”
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