Hollywood’s UK “Omnibus” Pirate Site Blocking Order Surfaces Through Cloudflare
Hollywood studios have secured a significant new type of piracy blocking order in the UK that substantially expands their ability to target emerging pirate streaming sites. The High Court granted the “omnibus” order in May 2026, allowing rightsholders to add new piracy services to existing blocking measures without filing a separate court application for every new domain or pirate brand.
The order was requested by Columbia, Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. and was issued by Mr Justice Mellor on 7 May 2026. It applies to six major UK internet service providers: BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.
Traditional UK blocking orders generally targeted specifically identified piracy domains and subsequently allowed related domains or mirrors using the same branding to be added. The new order goes considerably further. It establishes several initial “seed” piracy services, including 345movie.nl, 456movie.nl, cineby.app, movies2watch.watch and streamm4u.com.co, but also creates an open category through which unrelated piracy sites can subsequently be blocked.
The key innovation is that new targets do not need to share the same name, branding or domain structure as previously blocked services. They can qualify when they operate in essentially the same way, particularly by indexing or aggregating links that allow users to stream unauthorized films and audiovisual content. The measure is intended to address the increasingly fragmented piracy ecosystem, where users rapidly migrate between unrelated sites after individual domains are blocked.
There are defined criteria governing which additional services can be included. According to TorrentFreak’s analysis of the order, pirate movie streaming sites accessible from the UK that meet the required operational characteristics and fail to respond to infringement complaints can potentially become new blocking targets. This provides rightsholders with a mechanism for continuously expanding enforcement as new piracy services emerge.
A particularly important aspect is that adding qualifying sites does not require another judicial hearing. The studios determine whether a new service satisfies the criteria and notify the ISPs accordingly. The ISPs are explicitly not required to independently verify whether the studios or their enforcement agents have correctly classified the target.
Cloudflare has also voluntarily implemented blocks associated with the order despite not being a formal party to the proceedings. UK users attempting to access some targeted sites through Cloudflare infrastructure receive an HTTP 451 response indicating that the resource is unavailable for legal reasons.
The existence and details of the order had initially remained largely hidden from public view. Although the Motion Picture Association discussed it at WIPO and a Canadian Federal Court subsequently referenced the UK approach, the actual order had not appeared in the usual UK legal databases. A public version eventually surfaced through a Cloudflare transparency filing in the Lumen Database.
The order includes safeguards intended to reduce inappropriate blocking. Website operators and other affected parties can object to a block. Rightsholders are also prohibited from requesting the blocking of an IP address when the same server hosts legitimate websites, reducing the risk that unrelated services are inadvertently made inaccessible.
Another limitation is duration. The order automatically expires six months after its issuance unless the High Court extends it. Hollywood studios can return to court to request an extension, which also creates an opportunity for concerns regarding its operation to be raised.
The case represents an important evolution in UK anti piracy enforcement. Instead of forcing rightsholders to pursue individual sites or recognizable mirror networks, the omnibus model targets categories of structurally similar piracy services and allows the blocklist to evolve dynamically. This could make blocking considerably faster and more responsive to the increasingly decentralized and rapidly changing nature of online piracy.
