Belgium has stepped up its campaign against online copyright infringement by asking European domain registrars and at least one registry to turn over extensive records on people believed to be running pirate sites. The requests go far beyond typical website blocking.
Officials want names, contact details, banking information, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, transaction hashes, and a year of connection logs.
The instructions come from Belgium’s Department for Combating Online Infringement, known as BAPO.
They rest on orders from the French-speaking Business Court in Brussels. Five decisions were issued this week.
Four go to registrars; the fifth goes to a registry that holds registrant data directly.
Most names in the public versions of the documents are blacked out. Three EU-based companies appear by accident: Hosting Concepts, Hostinger, and Key Systems.
The court framed the effort as necessary to protect the sports economy and Europe’s solidarity model for broadcasting rights.
That language strongly suggests the targets are illegal sports streams rather than general movie or software sites.
BAPO says the secrecy was imposed by the judge, who wanted the plaintiff to be able to identify alleged infringers without tipping them off.
The data demanded is unusually detailed.
Registrars must supply every name, postal address, email, and phone number ever linked to an account.
They must also produce full IBANs, account-holder names, credit-card issuing banks and countries, and card types.
For crypto payments they must list wallet addresses, the type of asset used, and transaction hashes.
Technical records include the IP address, device, operating system, and browser used when the account was created, plus all connection logs from the past twelve months.
The registry order is narrower. It seeks registrant identity, the name of the registrar, nameservers, and a history of changes to the registration.
A gag order accompanies the requests.
The companies may not tell their customers, third parties, or the press that the proceedings exist. BAPO argues this is allowed under an exception in the EU Digital Services Act when criminal investigation is involved.
The result is that operators could have their financial and technical history handed to rightsholders without ever knowing.
Whether the orders can actually be enforced remains an open question.
The named companies sit outside Belgium.
BAPO points to Article 10 of the Digital Services Act and Belgian civil procedure, claiming any intermediary whose service is used to reach illegal content in Belgium can be compelled to disclose customer data—even if the company is outside the EU.
That assertion has not yet been tested in court.
Belgium’s blocklist already exceeds 1,500 domains.
Pirate operators routinely hop to new names, which has limited the impact of conventional blocking.
These new information orders represent an attempt to go after the people behind the sites rather than just the domains they use.
The identities of the rightsholders who obtained the court order, the specific domains involved, and the remaining intermediaries have not been made public. Compliance status is also unknown, and the gag order makes it unlikely that any of the companies will comment.