Germany set a number for switching off a website: 81.5% pirated

Germany has done something most countries avoid: it put a number on when a website may be switched off. If at least 81.5% of a site's content is infringing, courts treat it as "structurally infringing" and order the country's internet providers to block it. This summer the line was tested in public - one site was blocked at a measured 82.4%, another at more than 96%. A precise threshold sounds like fairness, but it also hands site operators a target to game and leaves ordinary users hitting a wall they can usually walk straight around.

How a site gets switched off

The blocking is run through CUII, the Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet - a body set up jointly by rightsholders and the big German internet providers. Since a rewrite of its rules in mid-2025, a block no longer happens by private agreement. It starts in court: a rightsholder sues one internet provider, a judge confirms the block, and the other providers then fall in line. In July 2026 the Cologne Regional Court confirmed blocks against the streaming portals KinoGo and Streamed, and all the major German providers now enforce them.

In practice the providers apply the block at the DNS level - the step that turns a domain name into a server address. The site itself is untouched; the provider simply stops answering the question "where is this domain?" for its own customers. That is the cheapest kind of block to run, and also the easiest to route around.

Where the number comes from

The 81.5% figure is not a guess. It was set by the Cologne Regional Court in a January 2025 default judgment against the download portal NOX, and CUII adopted it in a March 2025 order: illegal content "far outweighs" legal content, the court reasoned, once it reaches at least 81.5% of a site. To measure a given site, a private investigator takes a random sample of its pages and reports the infringing share at a 95.5% confidence level. KinoGo came in between 82.4% and 94.6%; the Streamed sites between 96.16% and 100%.

The loophole nobody has closed

Turn infringement into a percentage and you also publish the passing grade. Nothing stops an operator from padding a library with public-domain films, freely licensed clips or bulk AI-generated filler until the sampled share drops below 81.5% - while every pirated title stays exactly where it was. The threshold that was meant to protect careful, mostly-legal services becomes a formula for staying just under the line. A number is easy to write into a ruling and hard to defend once people optimise against it.

What a DNS block actually stops

Because these are DNS blocks, they stop the least determined visitor and almost no one else. The site keeps running; only your provider's answer to "where is it?" has been removed. Point your device at a different DNS resolver, or send your traffic through a VPN so a provider abroad answers the question instead, and the block is gone - which is exactly why demand for VPNs climbs every time a blocklist grows. That is also the honest limit of this tool: a VPN restores a route that your provider cut, but it changes nothing about the law that made the site infringing in the first place, and it does nothing for a site that has genuinely been taken down at the source rather than merely blocked.

If a site is blocked where you are

1. Check whether it is a DNS block. If a site fails to load on your home provider but opens on mobile data, or resolves from a public DNS resolver, you are almost certainly looking at a DNS-level block rather than a site that is actually down.
2. Change your resolver first. Switching your device or router to a public DNS resolver is the smallest possible change and often enough on its own, because the block lives only in your provider's own DNS answers.
3. Use a VPN when the block goes deeper. If the provider blocks by IP as well, routing your whole connection through a server in another country restores access, because the block is applied on your provider's network, not on the site.
4. Treat overblocking as a bug worth reporting. If a legitimate site stops working right after a blocklist update, it may be collateral from a shared address or nameserver. That is worth flagging to the site and to digital-rights groups that track these orders.