American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 — Plain English Decode
H.R. 10364 would, for the first time in US federal law, conscript ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services into a court-supervised piracy-blocking system — making it the closest the US has come to SOPA-style internet filtering since that bill's collapse in 2012.
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What It Does
H.R. 10364 inserts a new chapter into title 17 of the US Code — the copyright statute — creating a two-step judicial process for blocking foreign piracy sites. Step one: a US copyright holder petitions a federal district court for a formal declaration that a specific website is a "foreign piracy site" — defined as a site that is operated outside the United States and is primarily designed to enable copyright infringement. The proof standard is preponderance of the evidence, the same standard used in civil lawsuits. Step two: once a site is declared a foreign piracy site, any US rightsholder can petition a court (the same one or a different one) for a separate blocking order requiring covered "network operators" to take "reasonable steps" to prevent US users from accessing it. Covered operators are ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services with at least 100,000 monthly US subscribers. Root nameserver operators, top-level-domain registries, and most premises-based Wi-Fi networks are exempted. Before a blocking order takes effect, covered operators generally have 14 days to file objections — but judges may compress that window when the content at issue is a live sports broadcast or material being pirated within 24 hours of its commercial release. The bill does not mandate a specific blocking technique; "reasonable steps" could mean DNS-level blocking, IP-level blocking, or other methods, to be determined case by case. Parties wrongly blocked as collateral damage may seek compensation, with a reported cap in the bill text.
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The Real Story
This is a fight over whether copyright holders can conscript the internet's physical infrastructure — the ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPN tunnels that carry traffic — into the role of copyright enforcer. The Motion Picture Association, major Hollywood studios, and the recording industry want a domestic mechanism to cut off foreign piracy sites they can't sue because those sites operate outside US jurisdiction. Against them stands a coalition of EFF, Public Knowledge, CCIA, Re:Create, Fight for the Future, i2Coalition, and R Street Institute, who argue the bill doesn't go after pirates — it builds a censorship machine that will inevitably sweep up legitimate content. The deeper disagreement: entertainment companies believe ISPs and VPNs are passive conduits that should share responsibility for what flows through them; the tech and civil liberties sides believe making infrastructure providers into copyright cops destroys the neutrality that made the internet useful.
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Who Benefits
- Motion Picture Association and major Hollywood studios (Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Sony): Gain a domestic legal mechanism to block foreign streaming piracy sites — the ones that stream movies and TV shows the day of release — that they cannot reach through existing copyright litigation.
- Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and major labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music): Same mechanism for music piracy sites operating abroad.
- Live sports broadcasters and leagues (NFL, NBA, MLS, and their US broadcast partners): The bill's expedited provision specifically targets live sports piracy, giving broadcasters a faster injunction path against streams that go live during games.
- US Copyright Office: The legislation reinforces the office's long-standing position that existing DMCA tools are insufficient against foreign-hosted piracy.
- Entertainment litigation law firms: A new judicial petition mechanism creates a new category of legal work in US district courts.
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Who Gets Hurt
- VPN companies with 100,000+ US monthly subscribers — ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad, Proton VPN, and similar services: These are the first private companies in US history to face federal copyright blocking obligations. Compliance requires redesigning their services to implement court-ordered filters, and non-compliance means legal liability.
- Journalists, activists, and privacy-dependent VPN users: Services these users rely on for source protection or circumventing foreign surveillance would be required to implement blocking infrastructure that may be technically incompatible with their core privacy guarantees.
- Small businesses, nonprofits, and news sites sharing hosting infrastructure: Collateral blocking — where a blocking order hits a shared IP address or hosting network and takes down unrelated sites — is a documented consequence of DNS and IP blocking regimes in comparable countries. The reported $250,000 compensation cap may not cover actual economic harm from extended outages.
- Smaller ISPs and DNS operators: They face the same mandatory compliance obligations as large carriers but have proportionally fewer compliance, legal, and technical resources to meet them.
- Operators of legitimate foreign websites: Foreign site operators have no clear mechanism to challenge a US court's designation of their site as a "foreign piracy site" before the blocking order takes effect, and once blocked by major DNS resolvers they may effectively disappear from global internet access.
- Global internet users outside the US: If blocking orders apply to globally operated DNS resolvers, non-US users lose access to sites based on US court decisions they have no standing to contest.
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Red Flags
- DNS blocking can go global: Major DNS resolvers like Cloudflare and Google serve queries worldwide. A blocking order directed at them from a single US federal district court could effectively remove a website from the global internet — not just the US — without any foreign court, government, or affected party having standing to contest it.
- "Reasonable steps" is undefined: The bill requires covered operators to take "reasonable steps" to block access but does not specify whether that means DNS blocking, IP blocking, URL filtering, or deep packet inspection. Courts and operators will have to litigate this in real time, creating compliance uncertainty and opening the door to progressively more invasive blocking techniques.
- $250,000 compensation cap for collateral damage: Sources reviewing the bill's text report a ceiling of $250,000 for third-party sites wrongly blocked as collateral damage. Critics including Public Knowledge argue this is inadequate for a small business, nonprofit, or media outlet that is offline for months because it shares IP infrastructure with a targeted site.
- VPNs added after earlier drafts: Earlier discussion versions of this legislation covered only ISPs and DNS resolvers. Adding VPN services — used by journalists protecting sources, corporate security teams, political dissidents, and privacy-conscious consumers — significantly expands the scope beyond what was publicly discussed in prior iterations.
- Compressed objection window for live content: The standard 14-day window for covered operators to object before a blocking order takes effect can be shortened by the judge when live sports or content pirated within 24 hours of release is involved. This allows blocking orders affecting major technical infrastructure to be issued on emergency timelines, before operators can meaningfully evaluate technical consequences.
- No agency oversight — entirely judge-driven: A "foreign piracy site" is whatever a court declares to be one under the bill's declaration process, using only a preponderance-of-evidence standard. There is no administrative agency, no government expert review, and no centralized list with public scrutiny — each designation is driven by whichever rightsholder files first in whichever district court they choose.
- Perverse threshold effect: The 100,000-subscriber cutoff exempts small VPNs from blocking obligations entirely, creating a legal incentive for privacy services to cap their US user base — or to route sign-ups through foreign entities to stay below the threshold.
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Hidden Riders
- VPNs formally classified as copyright-regulated infrastructure for the first time in federal law: This is not just an anti-piracy provision — it is the first time Congress has placed VPN services into the same legal category as ISPs under copyright law. That classification, once established in statute, could be invoked in future legislation to extend other obligations to VPN providers beyond piracy.
- An emergency fast-track blocking mechanism built into a copyright bill: The compressed-timeline provision for live sports and recently released content is structurally an emergency injunction power running through copyright court petitions rather than through the standard temporary restraining order process, bypassing procedural safeguards that ordinarily apply when courts issue emergency orders affecting technical infrastructure.
- Forum shopping baked in: Because any copyright holder can file in any US federal district court, rightsholders can choose whichever court they believe is most favorable — a structural incentive to concentrate copyright blocking litigation in specific jurisdictions regardless of any connection between the parties and that district.
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Current Status
H.R. 10364 was introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on September 14, 2026, and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. It is at the earliest possible stage of the federal legislative process: no committee hearings have been publicly scheduled, no committee vote has occurred, and no floor action is imminent. The bill's full text was published on GovInfo shortly after introduction. It is not law and no blocking obligations are in effect. For it to become law it would need to clear the Judiciary Committee, pass a full House floor vote, pass the Senate (either independently or in reconciled form with the Block BEARD Act), and be signed by the President. No Senate companion bill to H.R. 10364 specifically has been identified — the Block BEARD Act is a parallel Senate effort, not a direct companion.
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Sources:
- [H.R. 10364 – Congress.gov](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/10364)
- [GovInfo – BILLS-119hr10364ih](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119hr10364ih)
- [TorrentFreak – U.S. Site Blocking Bill Adds VPNs](https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-site-blocking-bill-adds-vpns-to-the-list-of-blocking-intermediaries/)
- [TechRadar – US bill threatens to turn your VPN into a piracy blocklist](https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/us-bill-threatens-to-turn-your-vpn-into-a-piracy-blocklist)
- [Gizmodo – First Utah, Now Congress](https://gizmodo.com/first-utah-now-congress-a-new-us-bill-would-force-vpns-to-block-piracy-sites-2000813991)
- [IPWatchdog – Groups Slam Issa Bill](https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/09/16/groups-slam-issa-bill-to-expedite-site-blocking-orders/)
- [Plagiarism Today – New U.S. Site-Blocking Bill Introduced](https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2026/09/22/new-u-s-site-blocking-bill-introduced/)
- [Cablefax – PK Warns of Copyright Bill's Consequences](https://www.cablefax.com/regulation/pk-warns-of-copyright-bills-consequences)
- [EFF – Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes Into Effect](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulating-vpns-goes-effect-next-week)
- [Consequence.net – American Copyright Protection Act](https://consequence.net/2026/09/bill-internet-providers-block-piracy-sites/)
- [H.R. 791 – Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act, Congress.gov](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/791)
- [TorrentFreak – Block BEARD Act](https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-senators-introduce-new-pirate-site-blocking-bill-block-beard/)
H.R. 10364 would, for the first time in US federal law, conscript ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services into a court-supervised piracy-blocking system — making it the closest the US has come to SOPA-style internet filtering since that bill's collapse in 2012.
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Why now
On September 3, 2026 — just eleven days before this bill was introduced — Utah's SB 73 became the first US law to explicitly regulate VPN use, giving federal legislators political cover to go further at the national level. More broadly, entertainment industry lobbying for site-blocking legislation has been building for years across three competing proposals now advancing simultaneously. A backdrop of visible foreign piracy platforms that US courts cannot reach directly — because the sites operate outside US jurisdiction — has made the entertainment industry's argument that existing tools are inadequate more persuasive to Republican lawmakers. Issa framed H.R. 10364 specifically as a constitutionally safer redesign of SOPA's failed approach, one that runs through judges instead of the Justice Department.
---
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The real story
This is a fight over whether copyright holders can conscript the internet's physical infrastructure — the ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPN tunnels that carry traffic — into the role of copyright enforcer. The Motion Picture Association, major Hollywood studios, and the recording industry want a domestic mechanism to cut off foreign piracy sites they can't sue because those sites operate outside US jurisdiction. Against them stands a coalition of EFF, Public Knowledge, CCIA, Re:Create, Fight for the Future, i2Coalition, and R Street Institute, who argue the bill doesn't go after pirates — it builds a censorship machine that will inevitably sweep up legitimate content. The deeper disagreement: entertainment companies believe ISPs and VPNs are passive conduits that should share responsibility for what flows through them; the tech and civil liberties sides believe making infrastructure providers into copyright cops destroys the neutrality that made the internet useful.
---
##
Red flags
▸ DNS blocking can go global: Major DNS resolvers like Cloudflare and Google serve queries worldwide. A blocking order directed at them from a single US federal district court could effectively remove a website from the global internet — not just the US — without any foreign court, government, or affected party having standing to contest it.
▸ "Reasonable steps" is undefined: The bill requires covered operators to take "reasonable steps" to block access but does not specify whether that means DNS blocking, IP blocking, URL filtering, or deep packet inspection. Courts and operators will have to litigate this in real time, creating compliance uncertainty and opening the door to progressively more invasive blocking techniques.
▸ $250,000 compensation cap for collateral damage: Sources reviewing the bill's text report a ceiling of $250,000 for third-party sites wrongly blocked as collateral damage. Critics including Public Knowledge argue this is inadequate for a small business, nonprofit, or media outlet that is offline for months because it shares IP infrastructure with a targeted site.
▸ VPNs added after earlier drafts: Earlier discussion versions of this legislation covered only ISPs and DNS resolvers. Adding VPN services — used by journalists protecting sources, corporate security teams, political dissidents, and privacy-conscious consumers — significantly expands the scope beyond what was publicly discussed in prior iterations.
▸ Compressed objection window for live content: The standard 14-day window for covered operators to object before a blocking order takes effect can be shortened by the judge when live sports or content pirated within 24 hours of release is involved. This allows blocking orders affecting major technical infrastructure to be issued on emergency timelines, before operators can meaningfully evaluate technical consequences.
▸ No agency oversight — entirely judge-driven: A "foreign piracy site" is whatever a court declares to be one under the bill's declaration process, using only a preponderance-of-evidence standard. There is no administrative agency, no government expert review, and no centralized list with public scrutiny — each designation is driven by whichever rightsholder files first in whichever district court they choose.
▸ Perverse threshold effect: The 100,000-subscriber cutoff exempts small VPNs from blocking obligations entirely, creating a legal incentive for privacy services to cap their US user base — or to route sign-ups through foreign entities to stay below the threshold.
▸ --
Who benefits
• Motion Picture Association and major Hollywood studios (Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Sony): Gain a domestic legal mechanism to block foreign streaming piracy sites — the ones that stream movies and TV shows the day of release — that they cannot reach through existing copyright litigation.
• Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and major labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music): Same mechanism for music piracy sites operating abroad.
• Live sports broadcasters and leagues (NFL, NBA, MLS, and their US broadcast partners): The bill's expedited provision specifically targets live sports piracy, giving broadcasters a faster injunction path against streams that go live during games.
• US Copyright Office: The legislation reinforces the office's long-standing position that existing DMCA tools are insufficient against foreign-hosted piracy.
• Entertainment litigation law firms: A new judicial petition mechanism creates a new category of legal work in US district courts.
• --
Who gets hurt
• VPN companies with 100,000+ US monthly subscribers — ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad, Proton VPN, and similar services: These are the first private companies in US history to face federal copyright blocking obligations. Compliance requires redesigning their services to implement court-ordered filters, and non-compliance means legal liability.
• Journalists, activists, and privacy-dependent VPN users: Services these users rely on for source protection or circumventing foreign surveillance would be required to implement blocking infrastructure that may be technically incompatible with their core privacy guarantees.
• Small businesses, nonprofits, and news sites sharing hosting infrastructure: Collateral blocking — where a blocking order hits a shared IP address or hosting network and takes down unrelated sites — is a documented consequence of DNS and IP blocking regimes in comparable countries. The reported $250,000 compensation cap may not cover actual economic harm from extended outages.
• Smaller ISPs and DNS operators: They face the same mandatory compliance obligations as large carriers but have proportionally fewer compliance, legal, and technical resources to meet them.
• Operators of legitimate foreign websites: Foreign site operators have no clear mechanism to challenge a US court's designation of their site as a "foreign piracy site" before the blocking order takes effect, and once blocked by major DNS resolvers they may effectively disappear from global internet access.
• Global internet users outside the US: If blocking orders apply to globally operated DNS resolvers, non-US users lose access to sites based on US court decisions they have no standing to contest.
• --
What it does
H.R. 10364 inserts a new chapter into title 17 of the US Code — the copyright statute — creating a two-step judicial process for blocking foreign piracy sites. Step one: a US copyright holder petitions a federal district court for a formal declaration that a specific website is a "foreign piracy site" — defined as a site that is operated outside the United States and is primarily designed to enable copyright infringement. The proof standard is preponderance of the evidence, the same standard used in civil lawsuits. Step two: once a site is declared a foreign piracy site, any US rightsholder can petition a court (the same one or a different one) for a separate blocking order requiring covered "network operators" to take "reasonable steps" to prevent US users from accessing it. Covered operators are ISPs, DNS providers, and VPN services with at least 100,000 monthly US subscribers. Root nameserver operators, top-level-domain registries, and most premises-based Wi-Fi networks are exempted. Before a blocking order takes effect, covered operators generally have 14 days to file objections — but judges may compress that window when the content at issue is a live sports broadcast or material being pirated within 24 hours of its commercial release. The bill does not mandate a specific blocking technique; "reasonable steps" could mean DNS-level blocking, IP-level blocking, or other methods, to be determined case by case. Parties wrongly blocked as collateral damage may seek compensation, with a reported cap in the bill text.
---
##
Hidden riders
- VPNs formally classified as copyright-regulated infrastructure for the first time in federal law: This is not just an anti-piracy provision — it is the first time Congress has placed VPN services into the same legal category as ISPs under copyright law. That classification, once established in statute, could be invoked in future legislation to extend other obligations to VPN providers beyond piracy.
- An emergency fast-track blocking mechanism built into a copyright bill: The compressed-timeline provision for live sports and recently released content is structurally an emergency injunction power running through copyright court petitions rather than through the standard temporary restraining order process, bypassing procedural safeguards that ordinarily apply when courts issue emergency orders affecting technical infrastructure.
- Forum shopping baked in: Because any copyright holder can file in any US federal district court, rightsholders can choose whichever court they believe is most favorable — a structural incentive to concentrate copyright blocking litigation in specific jurisdictions regardless of any connection between the parties and that district.
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Precedent
The US came closest to federal site-blocking law with SOPA and PIPA in 2011-2012, which collapsed in January 2012 after Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of other sites ran a coordinated "Internet Blackout" that flooded Congress with millions of public messages in a single day. H.R. 10364 was explicitly designed to avoid SOPA's fatal weaknesses: it routes blocking through individualized judicial findings rather than government administrative lists, limits scope to foreign sites only, and requires a two-step court process rather than unilateral executive action. Since 2012, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, and the EU have all enacted court-supervised site-blocking regimes; entertainment industry supporters cite these as proof the internet did not collapse, while critics and organizations like the EFF cite those same regimes as evidence that overblocking of legitimate sites is not a hypothetical risk but a documented pattern.
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Current status
H.R. 10364 was introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on September 14, 2026, and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. It is at the earliest possible stage of the federal legislative process: no committee hearings have been publicly scheduled, no committee vote has occurred, and no floor action is imminent. The bill's full text was published on GovInfo shortly after introduction. It is not law and no blocking obligations are in effect. For it to become law it would need to clear the Judiciary Committee, pass a full House floor vote, pass the Senate (either independently or in reconciled form with the Block BEARD Act), and be signed by the President. No Senate companion bill to H.R. 10364 specifically has been identified — the Block BEARD Act is a parallel Senate effort, not a direct companion.
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Sources:
- [H.R. 10364 – Congress.gov](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/10364)
- [GovInfo – BILLS-119hr10364ih](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119hr10364ih)
- [TorrentFreak – U.S. Site Blocking Bill Adds VPNs](https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-site-blocking-bill-adds-vpns-to-the-list-of-blocking-intermediaries/)
- [TechRadar – US bill threatens to turn your VPN into a piracy blocklist](https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/us-bill-threatens-to-turn-your-vpn-into-a-piracy-blocklist)
- [Gizmodo – First Utah, Now Congress](https://gizmodo.com/first-utah-now-congress-a-new-us-bill-would-force-vpns-to-block-piracy-sites-2000813991)
- [IPWatchdog – Groups Slam Issa Bill](https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/09/16/groups-slam-issa-bill-to-expedite-site-blocking-orders/)
- [Plagiarism Today – New U.S. Site-Blocking Bill Introduced](https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2026/09/22/new-u-s-site-blocking-bill-introduced/)
- [Cablefax – PK Warns of Copyright Bill's Consequences](https://www.cablefax.com/regulation/pk-warns-of-copyright-bills-consequences)
- [EFF – Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes Into Effect](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulating-vpns-goes-effect-next-week)
- [Consequence.net – American Copyright Protection Act](https://consequence.net/2026/09/bill-internet-providers-block-piracy-sites/)
- [H.R. 791 – Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act, Congress.gov](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/791)
- [TorrentFreak – Block BEARD Act](https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-senators-introduce-new-pirate-site-blocking-bill-block-beard/)
What to watch
H.R. 10364 sits in the House Judiciary Committee alongside two competing proposals — the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (H.R. 791, introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA) and the Senate's Block BEARD Act (Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC) — creating an unusual three-way competition among bills with overlapping goals and partially overlapping industry support. The key question for the coming months is whether the Judiciary Committee consolidates these into one unified bill, which entertainment industry advocates have been pushing for, or lets all three compete. Citizens opposed to internet filtering infrastructure should contact their representatives on the House Judiciary Committee, as no floor vote is imminent and the committee stage is where the bill's scope will either expand, contract, or be folded into a compromise.
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