A New Kind of Live-Event Enforcement
During every live World Cup match at the 2026 FIFA tournament, a team of analysts at Brazil's film and audiovisual regulator ANCINE has been doing something few rights enforcement agencies have attempted at this operational cadence: monitoring pirate streaming services in real time and issuing new blocking orders every thirty minutes.
Under Normative Instruction 174/2026 (IN 174), published in Brazil's official gazette on April 10, 2026, ANCINE gained formal authority to direct the National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL) to block domains, subdomains, URLs, and IP addresses used for unauthorized audiovisual distribution — including, critically, "future variations of the same services." That last clause is what makes dynamic enforcement legally possible. The framework rests on Law 14,815/2024, which granted ANCINE explicit statutory authority to suspend unauthorized use of protected audiovisual works in the digital environment.
Why Live Piracy Demands a Different Approach
The enforcement challenge with live streaming piracy is fundamentally different from blocking a static pirated website. A platform hosting on-demand films can be disabled by a court order and remain disabled. A live stream can jump to a new IP address in minutes.
ANCINE coordinator Eduardo Carneiro has described the logic directly: "if I block an IP number, they can change that target to continue the illegal service. We monitor this and every 30 minutes, new blocking orders are issued." The thirty-minute cadence is calibrated to the evasion window — a pirate service that migrates to a new IP address during one blocking round finds itself blocked again before the next half of the match begins.
The technical infrastructure enabling this was built through a Technical Cooperation Agreement between ANCINE and ANATEL, signed in Brasília on May 15, 2025. Pilot testing began modestly: 11 domains and 23 IP addresses linked to three pirate services. By the time IN 174 was published, the system had expanded to 78 domains and 125 IP addresses across ten monitored services, and had processed more than 3,500 IP targets across 78 sequential blocking operations. The average result: an 83.8% reduction in access attempts to targeted illegal platforms. Across all pilot phases combined, ANCINE and ANATEL blocked more than 10,700 targets, with illegal service access falling by 80.5% on average.
Cutting the Money, Not Just the Signal
The more consequential innovation in Brazil's framework is not the blocking itself — injunction-based site blocking has been standard practice in the EU and UK for over a decade. It is the coordinated targeting of financial infrastructure.
IN 174 explicitly authorizes ANCINE to direct notifications to search engines, electronic payment services, and advertising networks. During the World Cup, this means pirate platforms face not just access disruption but the active removal of credit card payment options and the severing of advertising revenue flows, coordinated through Brazil's National Anti-Piracy Council (CNCP). The "follow the money" approach is designed to make the piracy business model structurally unviable, not merely technically inconvenient.
This has precedent in the UK, where courts have progressively expanded Section 97A blocking orders over years of litigation — from ISP-level blocking to payment processor notifications. Brazil has codified the same multi-vector logic in a single regulatory instrument, potentially compressing a decade of iterative UK jurisprudence into one normative instruction.
The Strongest Case for Caution
The proportionate concern here is real and deserves a fair hearing. Any dynamic blocking regime — one capable of issuing new orders every thirty minutes targeting "future variations" of known services — creates enforcement infrastructure that can be misused. The same mechanism that kills a pirate IPTV service during a World Cup match could, under different political circumstances, be turned against legitimate platforms quickly and without immediate judicial review.
IN 174 does include procedural protections: rights holders must demonstrate ownership and unauthorized use; targets retain the right to be heard, present a defense, and file administrative appeals; and rights holders bear liability for inaccurate claims. ANCINE also committed to semi-annual transparency reporting on enforcement actions. These are not cosmetic safeguards — they reflect an attempt to preserve due process within an expedited framework.
The harder question is whether they hold under operational pressure. A thirty-minute blocking cycle during a ninety-minute match means enforcement decisions are being made at machine speed. Whether the administrative process has the bandwidth to handle challenges in real time — rather than as post-hoc appeals after the match has ended — will determine whether the due process architecture is substantive or merely formal.
A Model Others Will Study
Brazil has one of the world's largest IPTV piracy markets, with millions of households subscribing to illegal "TV box" services that systematically undercut licensed broadcasters. The 2026 World Cup, co-hosted across North and South America with multiple matches in Brazil itself, was the highest-stakes live broadcast event on Earth and a logical proving ground.
What ANCINE has assembled is not a one-off enforcement operation. It is a regulatory architecture: a statutory foundation in Law 14,815/2024, an automated technical pipeline with ANATEL, a financial disruption layer targeting payments and advertising, and a transparency commitment via semi-annual reporting. If the 83.8% reduction from pilots translates to real World Cup conditions — and the thirty-minute cycle holds under load — Brazil will have built the most operationally concrete model for real-time live-event copyright enforcement in the world.
Jurisdictions with comparable piracy markets and upcoming major broadcast events — India, Mexico, Indonesia — will study this architecture carefully. The lesson is not that blocking works in isolation. It is that blocking, combined with financial infrastructure targeting, implemented through a formal regulatory framework with expedited live-event procedures, can shift the economics of piracy at scale.
The residual question is not efficacy. It is durability: whether the institutional safeguards built into IN 174 prove robust enough to prevent a live-enforcement machine, once built, from being directed toward less proportionate ends.