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New Bill to Effectively Kill Anime & Other Piracy in the U.S. Gets Backing by Netflix, Disney & Sony

Netflix, Sony & more back a new anti-piracy bill aiming to ban access to infringing sites in the U.S., with its reach spanning anime and much more.
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The Motion Pictures Association, comprising Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Sony and more, has backed a new bill bolstering efforts to ban access to anime, live-action, novel, music and other forms of 'piracy' sites in the U.S. and potentially beyond.

Via Torrent Freak, on Jan. 29, 2025, U.S. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren tabled H.R. 791, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA). If enacted, copyright holders and exclusive licensees (collectively referred to as petitioners) will be able to petition a U.S. District Court to issue a "preliminary" order to certain U.S. service providers, i.e. Google, Cloudflare and broadband providers -- an initial step to forcing them to block customer access to foreign 'piracy' platforms (websites, apps)."
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This preliminary step is to allow the court to conduct a risk assessment into whether the order will "interfere with user access to non-infringing material on another website or online service, significantly burden the service provider, including the operation of the system or network of the service provider or disserve the public interest," as well as to seek testimony from the accused foreign 'piracy' platform. The foreign operator has 30 days to appear in court for a response. Assuming no opposition comes, the court may appoint a "master" to assist the court in verifying the claims of the rightsholder. The court will otherwise render its judgment within 14 days of receiving opposition from the foreign site.


If the court is satisfied with the petitioner's claims and its risk assessment, it will issue the blocking order, forcing service providers to deny access to the 'piracy' site within 15 days (20, if the court finds good cause). Notably, the court can also issue a blocking order without waiting for the foreign platform's opposition in the case of an imminent or ongoing live event, such as sports or a concert. If the court has issued a blocking order for a live event, the service provider must comply within 7 days. For non-live events and after the blocking order is granted, the petitioner can move at any point to have it extended for another 12 months if the foreign website has not ceased its infringement.
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The bill defined U.S. service providers as broadband providers with over 100,000 subscribers, and DNS resolution providers with over $100 million in annual revenue that don't exclusively provide DNS services through encrypted means. Therefore, the likely recipients of these orders would include major ISPs like Comcast and AT&T, as well as Cloudflare and Google (which operates Google Public DNS). These two companies have been at the center of numerous DMCA takedown requests and U.S. subpoenas related to copyright infringement. Cloudflare was recently subpoenaed on behalf of Weekly Shonen Jump's Shueisha, while Crunchyroll and Funimation have filed over 45 million DMCA takedown requests with Google.

The bill also defines what a foreign piracy website means in this context. The site must be operated by a foreign person, who in turn is defined as a person physically located outside the U.S. Nevertheless, it also refers to people whose physical location cannot be determined to be within the U.S., potentially broadening its scope. The website must be found to be primarily designed for infringing copyright, intentionally marketed to be used as an infringing website and have "no commercially significant purpose or use other than infringing copyright."
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