The fight against cultural and sports-related contdnt piracy in 2025: intensification and expansion to new players

Published on 23 March 2026

Hacking
Creative protection

Summary

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Since 2022, Arcom's actions have been strengthening the protection of creative, sports-related and cultural content against piracy, by extending the fight to new players and adapting legal and technical tools.

Highlights of the 2025 report:

the decline in illegal use continues, with a 34% decrease since 2021, and now concerns 14% of the Internet user population, or around 7.7 million people;
the implementation of blocking requests, at Arcom's request, has led to the blocking of almost 15,200 domain names, with a notable increase in blockings linked to sports-related domain names (+71% between 2024 and 2025) and mirror sites (+37%).
at the instigation of rights holders, Arcom has extended its blocking demands to other players: alternative DNS providers (such as Google, Cloudflare), VPNs (such as NordVPN, Cyberghost and others) and search engines, to strengthen the effectiveness of measures;
the involvement of technical intermediaries needs to be strengthened: Arcom is encouraging the conclusion of agreements with intermediaries to speed up the application of measures, and is considering sharing the list of blocked domain names with voluntary players;
European legislation, in particular the RSN, supplies opportunities for strengthening cooperation and regulation, notably through the status of "trusted flagger" and injunctions to intermediaries.