A Rotterdam court has ordered the Dutch internet provider KPN to block access to Z-Library and OceanofPDF, which the anti-piracy group BREIN describes as the two largest and most popular book piracy sites not yet blocked in the Netherlands.
The ruling, issued last Friday, covers six domains: oceanofpdf.com, and Z-Library's z-library.sk, z-library.la, 1lib.sk, z-lib.gd and articles.sk. It was reported by TorrentFreak, which has seen a copy of the ruling; the judgment itself has not been published publicly.
Between them, BREIN says, the two shadow libraries offer tens of thousands of titles belonging to Dutch rightsholders, including books, magazines, academic journals, sheet music and newspapers.
At the time the summons was served, OceanofPDF was receiving more than 200,000 visits a month from the Netherlands and Z-Library more than 300,000.
Neither site is new to the Dutch courts' attention. In March 2024 the same court added Anna's Archive and Library Genesis to the national blocklist. BREIN left Z-Library out of that case in order to prioritise the two more popular sites, having warned back in 2022 that it could seek a block if Z-Library returned following the American crackdown on it.
The legal foundation is not a statute but an agreement. In October 2021 BREIN signed a site-blocking covenant with several Dutch internet providers, and the other major providers have since agreed to follow it.
The covenant sets conditions before any court action. BREIN must first try to have a site removed at source, and in July it approached the operators, registrars, registries and hosting providers behind these two. That produced no effect, and the court held that BREIN could not be expected to do more.
The covenant also governs who gets sued. It requires BREIN to bring its cases against providers in alphabetical order. KPN was next.
The order granted is a dynamic one. It reaches future domains, subdomains, proxies and mirrors, and BREIN can add new ones to the list without going back to court.
KPN has resisted that breadth before. In 2023 it argued that a similar dynamic order, covering Lookmovie and Flixtor, was too broad, and the court disagreed. This time the company did not defend itself at all, leaving the decision to the judge.
The technical ground is also shifting. Since 2025 users have been able to run Z-Library mirrors on domains of their own, and since June those mirrors can carry custom branding and password protection, which makes them considerably harder for rightsholders to find.
BREIN's own case is put simply. "So there's no reason at all to get books from illegal sources," the group says, pointing readers to legal ebook and audiobook services and to public libraries, and noting that illegal services keep all of their revenue: "Nothing reaches the authors and publishers."
Which brings us to the instrument at the centre of all this. Dutch copyright enforcement, as currently constituted, runs on the alphabet.
A provider's position in the queue is a property of its name. Nothing about its subscriber numbers, its traffic, its conduct or its willingness to cooperate moves it forward or holds it back. The only variable that determines when a Dutch internet company is taken to court over book piracy is how it is spelled.
The asymmetry is worth noticing. The blocklist itself can now grow without a court at all, because the order is dynamic, while the defendants can be reached only in dictionary order, one at a time, as the covenant works its way through the index.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that a provider could in principle reduce its exposure by renaming itself, and that any firm beginning with a late letter already enjoys a form of protection that no amount of compliance can buy. It further notes that the alphabet is the one element of the scheme against which there is no appeal.
KPN did not turn up to argue. There was nothing to argue about. The letter K is not in dispute.