If you hold copyright in music, film, software or any content that pirates love, a court order blocking the offending site is one of the most effective tools you have — but only if you treat it as a living instrument, not a trophy. The question every rights holder should be asking is not just how to block a copyright-infringing website, but how to keep that block working as the pirates move.

A recent Federal Court decision extending a long-running music industry injunction for a further three years — taking it past the ten-year mark — is a useful reminder of how these orders actually earn their keep. Under section 115A of the Copyright Act, a copyright owner can obtain a carriage service provider injunction requiring ISPs like Telstra, Optus and TPG to disable access to overseas piracy sites. The strategic point sits in the housekeeping: the Court extended the order, but only after pruning dead domain names, swapping out respondents that were no longer carriage service providers, adding new corporate entities, and — notably — requiring the applicants’ solicitors to certify a good-faith belief that the targeted sites were still infringing. The order adapts because the people enforcing it keep feeding the Court accurate facts.

The durable lesson for IP-intensive businesses is that enforcement is an operational commitment, not a one-off win. Pirate operators register fresh domains the moment the old ones are blocked, so the value of a site-blocking order lies in the mechanism that lets you add new pathways by agreement with the ISPs, without running back to court each time — and in the discipline of actually using it.

Three things are worth building into your online piracy enforcement program: a monitoring routine that catches mirror and proxy domains as they appear; a documented, regular review so you can certify in good faith that targets are still live and infringing (and promptly release blocks on those that aren’t); and a diarised renewal well ahead of expiry, because these orders lapse if you let them. The broader principle is one we return to often — a right you don’t actively manage quietly decays. The competitive edge goes to the owner who treats enforcement as a standing process, with the evidence trail to back it.

For related reading, see Repeated infringement and failing to show up gets you 5x damages on how a defendant’s conduct shapes the remedy, IP update: vaccines, counterfeits, textbook piracy and tm translations on the wider piracy and counterfeiting enforcement landscape, and Fast and intuitive IP decision making on making sound enforcement calls under pressure.

Read the full judgment — Universal Music Australia Pty Limited v TPG Internet Pty Ltd (No 2) [2026] FCA 731.