Five Latin American nations have concluded a coordinated anti-digital piracy campaign that has resulted in the blocking of over 300 copyright-violating websites, marking a major step forward in cross-border collaboration to combat online intellectual property theft. The operation, codenamed Regional Operation Lumen, was hosted in Lima, Peru, bringing together copyright enforcement authorities from Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic for two days of strategy sharing and coordinated action September 22–23.
The gathering was hosted by Peru’s National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi), the country’s lead body for intellectual property regulation and enforcement. Representing the Dominican Republic was a high-level delegation led by José Rubén Gonell Cosme, director general of the nation’s National Copyright Office (ONDA), alongside Lucía Castillo Arbaje, head of ONDA’s Collective Management Societies Department.
Digital piracy has emerged as a particularly complex challenge for regional regulators, as pirate copyright platforms frequently exploit gaps in cross-border jurisdiction by spreading operations across multiple domains, using automatic redirects, and replicating their technical infrastructure in different countries to avoid detection and enforcement. During the working sessions of Operation Lumen, all participating member states exchanged actionable strategies, detailed case studies, and proven frameworks for preventing, identifying, and dismantling these transnational online copyright violations.
The Dominican delegation took center stage to share ONDA’s systematic, multi-stage approach to tackling online piracy, which combines rigorous technical investigation, proper evidence preservation, and targeted legal analysis. As part of the operation, ONDA investigators carried out on-the-ground technical documentation of suspected piracy platforms, mapping every key detail from web URLs and redirect pathways to screenshots, content formats, and built-in file conversion and downloading tools that enable copyright infringement.
Through this technical review, the Dominican team identified 126 active subdomains linked to suspected pirate platforms, along with the complex multi-domain and redirect mechanisms that these services use to evade blocks. In its presentation, ONDA underlined a core principle of its enforcement work: the mere existence of a website or online platform does not inherently qualify as a copyright violation. All technical findings must be paired with a careful legal assessment to determine if protected intellectual property rights have been infringed, and if the platform’s activity falls outside the allowances established under Dominican Republic’s Law No. 65-00 on Copyright.
Following the completion of coordinated enforcement actions across the five participating countries, Indecopi confirmed that Operation Lumen had delivered a tangible win for copyright protection: more than 300 pirate websites had been permanently blocked across the region.
For the Dominican Republic, the participation in Operation Lumen delivers dual benefits, ONDA officials noted. It strengthens the country’s own domestic capacity to enforce online copyright protection, while also deepening institutional ties and cooperative frameworks with intellectual property regulators across Latin America, laying the groundwork for more effective cross-border anti-piracy action in the future.