Groups Slam Issa Bill to Expedite Site Blocking Orders

Representative Darrell Issa introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) on Monday, a bill aimed at creating an expedited judicial mechanism for copyright owners to obtain orders blocking access to certain foreign piracy sites.

While the official text of the bill has not yet been published, several groups have responded based on their review of a draft of the bill that was circulated to stakeholders in May 2025. According to those accounts, the bill would allow a copyright owner to petition a designated federal judge to block a piracy site; the court would decide whether the target was a qualifying ‘foreign piracy site’; and then the court could order covered service providers to take reasonable steps to stop U.S. users from accessing it. These orders could also subsequently be updated, renewed, narrowed, or rescinded.

Lawful third parties erroneously blocked because of a copyright owner’s mistake could seek up to $250,000.

In late June, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, led by Issa, held a hearing, the goal of which Issa said was to be proactive rather reactive in stopping mass piracy on the internet, and to discuss ways to update the law in light of new technologies like generative AI.

Issa said that, while the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been useful for rightsholders, the speed at which takedowns operate is inefficient for today’s digital reality. Counterfeiting and piracy are also linked to illicit drug operations and fake pharmaceuticals, which can be lethal to consumers, he noted.

But groups including Re:Create and Public Knowledge have spoken out against the bill this week. Re:Create Executive Director Brandon Butler called the legislation “anything but American,” and said that it promotes censorship. “By codifying a one-sided legal process modeled on European site-blocking laws, which have been shown to cause widespread censorship, this bill violates American due process, First Amendment rights, and American ingenuity,” Butler said.

Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel, Meredith Rose, said the approach is misguided and will have far-reaching consequences. “Rather than attacking the problem at its source by bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court, Congress and its entertainment industry allies have decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship,” Rose said. “Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites simply accused of copyright infringement.”

As a result, one court can cut off global access to a website, the statement continued. This has led to problems in Europe, where such orders have already been implemented, and will put small businesses and nonprofits most at risk, Rose added.

According to a Re:Create one-pager, innocent websites remained blocked for an average of 320 days in Italy and 5.8% of the popular internet was blocked by Spain’s system during LaLiga matches, including Harvard University and Greenpeace.

Two other bills aimed at curbing pirate sites are being considered by congress. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D–CA) is sponsoring the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (The FADPA Act (H.R.791)), which also addresses the gap in judicial remedies to target foreign piracy sites. Introduced in January 2025, it would amend Title 17 to establish a judicial process allowing copyright owners and exclusive licensees to petition U.S. district courts for blocking orders against foreign websites or online services engaged in large-scale copyright infringement. While FADPA and the ACPA share many features, the draft of the ACPA that has been released is generally viewed as a more centralized and faster approach, with a broader reach

Another bipartisan bill, titled “Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act of 2025’’(the Block BEARD Act), is aimed at blocking foreign websites dedicated to piracy from making stolen content available to U.S. users. A discussion draft of the bill was announced in in July 2025 by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Adam Schiff (D-CA).

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