A minister told the anti-piracy establishment it has a double standard — at its own summit

At the Lumière Summit in the south of France — a one-day gathering of studio executives, ministers and filmmakers hosted by Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Lee Jae Myung — the anti-piracy session went as planned until one panelist declined to play along. According to TorrentFreak, which transcribed the exchanges from the summit’s own recordings, South Africa’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie accused the industry of operating “dual standards”.

”We need to define what is piracy”

McKenzie’s first argument drew on the summit itself. That morning, Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh had told the opening session that his films, banned in Egypt, still reach Egyptian audiences through piracy: “Egyptians love piracy, which is working very well for me.” McKenzie cited it alongside a Canadian series pirated in countries where it is banned, and his own memory of apartheid-era South Africa, where prohibited films circulated only through unauthorised copies.

The inconsistency, as he framed it, is that piracy which defeats censorship is celebrated, while piracy by people who cannot afford legitimate access is prosecuted. He called the industry’s approach “a bit schizophrenic”.

The boat that leaks on one side

The second argument was aimed at the panel next to him. ARCOM chair Martin Ajdari had just presented France’s record: more than 22,000 blocking and delisting injunctions in five years, 10,000 in 2026 alone, with the piracy audience halved since 2018. McKenzie called it impressive, then offered the image that carried the session: two people in the same boat, which is leaking on one side only, while the occupants of the dry side congratulate themselves.

Asymmetric enforcement, in other words, produces excellent national statistics and unchanged global supply — an argument that lands differently now that France, Belgium, Italy and soon perhaps the United States are building increasingly sophisticated blocking machinery, most recently at the DNS resolver level.

”We are not beggars”

The third argument was about how cooperation gets requested. After WIPO’s Sylvie Forbin recalled the intellectual property conditions attached to WTO membership in the 1990s, McKenzie pushed back: “Don’t try to punish us like we are children, because we are not children.” He noted that South Africa does not lack the money to fund anti-piracy work — it declines to be handed a budget and a to-do list. “We are not beggars. We want a partnership of equals.”

The context is real: in 2020, US copyright groups asked Washington to review South Africa’s trade preferences over the fair use provisions in its copyright bill. South Africa is meanwhile working with Canal+ on football piracy and runs anti-piracy warnings before every match. The summit closed with a voluntary declaration on strengthened international cooperation against piracy — with no hard commitments, and, so far, no South African signature.

What this means for you

For rightsholders and brand owners the significance is not diplomatic, it is operational. Blocking orders are national instruments; infringing infrastructure, mirror farms and streaming operations are not. Every enforcement map has holes, and the holes are disproportionately in markets where cooperation is experienced as conditionality rather than partnership. The minister’s boat metaphor is the practical version of what we have documented repeatedly: Romania blocking 808 domains, Chile building a rolling DNS pipeline — while the same operations stay fully reachable elsewhere.

There is also a reputational read worth taking seriously. Enforcement programmes that cannot articulate why they target commercial infringement rather than individual consumers hand critics an easy argument. The strongest cases in brand protection are the ones where the target is plainly a business: clone sites monetising your brand, counterfeit shops, scam casinos using your licence number. That distinction is not just ethics — it is what makes hosts, registrars and regulators act quickly.

Counsel’s note. Most enforcement programmes measure themselves by volume: notices sent, domains blocked, URLs delisted. Those numbers look excellent domestically and explain nothing about whether the infringing operation stopped. The working method is to measure the target, not the territory: is the operator still trading, on which infrastructure, reachable from where? One removal at the host that ends the operation everywhere beats fifty blocking orders that move it next door. We broke down the escalation sequence in our guide to legal content removal.