Current Month (January 2026)
U.S. DOJ Assists in Takedown of EU Piracy Websites
By Alan S. Wernick, Esq., Wernick & Associates, LTD.
The costs of digital content piracy are expensive to the individuals and businesses who own digital content intellectual-property (“IP”) rights in general, and copyright rights in particular. Whether the digital content is software, e-books, music, movies, television shows, or other copyrighted content, losses are measured in Billions of dollars.[1] This is a global problem that IP rights owners, and law enforcement agencies around the world, have been dealing with for decades. One of the enforcement problems for digital content IP owners has been the tension between the Internet being generally open and without geographic boundaries, and law enforcement being generally tied to geographic boundaries.
The U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), one of many law enforcement agencies concerned with IP infringement, recently issued a press release announcing it had assisted Bulgarian law enforcement through the execution of seizure warrants against three U.S. registered Internet domains of commercial websites allegedly illegally distributing copyrighted works. The allegedly illegally copied and distributed copyrighted works included software, e-books, movies, television shows, and other copyrighted content. According to the DOJ press release, many of these copyrighted works belong to U.S. companies and individuals.
The DOJ press release stated that “according to the affidavits in support of the seizure warrants, the three domains receive tens of millions of visits a year, offer thousands of infringed works, and result in millions of downloads of those works, the retail value totaling millions of dollars. The three domains are among the most popular in Bulgaria – one is often ranked as one of the top 10 most visited domains in Bulgaria – and, given the huge internet traffic they receive every day, seem to make considerable money from advertisements.”
The DOJ noted in its press release that it had teamed up with several law enforcement agencies, including Bulgarian and domestic partners.
Historically, part of the problem in dealing with digital content piracy has been the jurisdictional issues. Digital content pirates often resided in countries that shielded them from the activities of law enforcement residing outside the jurisdiction where the digital content pirates lived. As this DOJ press release shows, the collaboration of law enforcement across jurisdictional boundaries has become an effective measure in dealing with digital content piracy in our commerce-connected global community.
© 2026 Alan S. Wernick
As of January 31, 2026, a partial list of reports purporting to quantify these losses includes, without limitation: (A) David Blackburn, Jeffrey A. Eisenach & David Harrison Jr., Impacts of Digital Video Piracy on the U.S. Economy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce (June 15, 2019) (“[W]e estimate that, in 2017, digital video piracy cost the U.S. economy between 230,000 and 560,000 jobs and between $47.5 billion and $115.3 billion in GDP.”); (B) Off. of U.S. Trade Representative, 2024 Special 301 Report 34 (Apr. 2024) (“According to a 2018 study, the commercial value of unlicensed software globally was at least $46 billion in 2018.” (citing Software Management: Security Imperative, Business Opportunity, BSA 12 (June 2018))); (C) Unlocking Creativity: The Socioeconomic Benefits of Copyright, U.S. Chamber of Commerce (June 24, 2025) (“Looking at U.S. film, TV, and music specifically, infringement drains between $29 billion and $71 billion from the economy each year and leads to a loss of between 230,000 and 560,000 jobs.”). ↑
