New House Bill could let courts force VPNs to block anime and manga piracy sites

A new bill introduced in the US House of Representatives could give copyright holders, including anime and manga publishers, a fast-track legal path to get piracy sites blocked at the network level, with obligations extending to internet service providers, DNS providers, and even VPN services.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee on intellectual property and the internet, introduced H.R. 10364, the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026, on September 14, and it has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. The bill would create a two-step judicial process: first, a copyright holder petitions a court to formally declare a site a "foreign piracy site"; then, they can seek a separate blocking order compelling network operators to cut off US access.

The evidentiary bar isn't especially high. Copyright holders would need to show, by a preponderance of the evidence, that a site is primarily designed for piracy, and once that designation lands, courts could issue blocking orders with a default 14-day window for service providers to respond, shortened further for time-sensitive content like live sports.

Read the full text of the introduction of the bill here.

Why this matters for anime and manga fans

The bill isn't industry-specific, but its reach is broad enough to sweep in the piracy and scanlation ecosystem anime and manga fans know well. The blocking obligation would apply to ISPs, domain name resolution services, and VPN services with at least 100,000 monthly US users or subscribers — which notably includes the mainstream VPN apps many fans use for geo-unlocking simulcasts or, yes, accessing piracy mirrors.

That VPN provision is the part drawing the most pushback. Groups like Re:Create (among others) have warned about jurisdiction problems — routing blocking orders through global DNS resolvers raises the prospect of a single US court effectively cutting off access to a site worldwide, not just domestically. Re:Create's executive director Brandon Butler was blunt about it, calling the bill something other than what its name suggests. 

“The American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 is anything but American,” said Butler (via Gadget Review).

“Rather than attacking the problem at its source by bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court, Congress and its entertainment industry allies have decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship,” added Senior Policy Counsel, Public Knowledge officer Meredith Rose.

Digital rights advocates have also flagged collateral damage risk. DNS and IP-based blocking can disrupt legitimate sites that happen to share domains, IP addresses, or hosting infrastructure with an actual piracy target — a real concern for smaller manga/anime fan sites, aggregators, and community forums that share hosting with less scrupulous neighbors.

Not the first attempt

This isn't Congress's first swing at site-blocking legislation, and it won't be the last. Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act in January 2025, and a separate bipartisan Senate effort called the Block BEARD Act is also in development, backed by lawmakers including Blackburn, Coons, Schiff, and Tillis. H.R. 10364 revives a fight that helped sink the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act back in 2012, a comparison longtime fandom-internet watchers will recognize immediately.

For now, the bill's exact text and its treatment of wrongly-blocked sites remain unclear pending official publication. The circulating draft does exempt root nameserver operators, top-level-domain registries, and many premises-based Wi-Fi networks from the blocking mandate.

Photo: Eiichiro Oda