According to the 2025 annual report from the Danish Rights Alliance, that year was characterized by three trends: by new ways of using artificial intelligence, successful blocking of illegal services and by efforts against illegal content on social media.
Film, TV and series continue to be the type of content that Danes consume most illegally. This is evident from the survey by Dansk Erhverv, where 16% of Danes aged 15–74 responded that they had accessed films or series illegally within the past year. In addition, 9% stated that they had streamed sports events illegally, while 5% had streamed other live TV illegally within the same period.
A full 41% of 15-29 year olds say they fear viruses and ransomware, while 31% fear being punished and 31% fear the misuse of their personal information. And yet, according to a survey from 2025 by the Danish Chamber of Commerce, 45% of 15-29 year-olds have used illegal content within the past year.
The following are highlights of the Report’s findings.
Artificial intelligence
Rights-holders are increasingly challenged by ‘web crawlers’ which copy full-length articles from Danish media houses’ websites without permission from or compensation to the copyright holders. This is an undertaking that results in Danish media content – illegal copies of books, articles, images, films, music, etc. – being illegally made available for training AI services via datasets used by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, IBM, NVIDIA, DeepSeek and Meta.
In a report published in March 2025, the Rights Alliance documented the massive theft of rights and which datasets and AI providers have used the content. It appears that the world’s leading companies behind AI services – including Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Midjourney – have been built by training on pirated copies.
Another threat is from students. When using AI to complement their studies, many students upload copyrighted material to generative AI services, which is illegal. This entails a risk that the material will be made publicly available to other users or even published. A 2025 opinion poll showed that 25% of students have tried to upload textbooks or excerpts to a chatbot, and 72% of them do not know that it is illegal.
Just as online platforms must take responsibility for removing sharing of films, sports, etc., said the Rights Alliance, AI services should take responsibility for preventing users from uploading books, etc. without permission. As things stand today, AI services have no technical measures to prevent users from uploading protected content.
Another area where Rights Alliance is active is in efforts to protect rights holders against violations of their personality and professionalism via deepfakes, in which the organization is working with the government to shape policy.
Site blocking
Both the supply and consumption of content via illegal IPTV services are growing. In 2025, the Rights Alliance, in collaboration with a member company, filed a request with the courts to block the 10 most widespread illegal IPTV services in Denmark. The case led to the first Danish decision ordering members of the telecommunications industry to block access to illegal IPTV services.
In 2025, the Rights Alliance focused on bringing new blocking cases, which meant that telecommunications companies would have to block more services in the future and thus prevent greater consumption of illegal content. In addition, they worked to optimize and automate the implementation of blocking to a greater extent to help ensure more effective enforcement.
Blocking illegal websites is a key tool for protecting Danish content, which the Rights Alliance has been leading since the establishment of the blocking system. In practice, this means that each year the telecommunications companies block several websites and services that the courts have found to be illegal.
Social media
The Rights Alliance is working to ensure that platforms meet their obligations under the Digital Services Act to a greater extent by strengthening enforcement through more uniform and effective tools.
Social media, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, are widely used to spread and consume copyrighted content illegally. The Rights Alliance works to prevent the spread of content that infringes the rights of our members; monitoring content for many years using online platforms’ own takedown tools.
One example is the Rights Alliance collaboration with TikTok, where we worked to remove keywords that contribute to the spread and marketing of illegal content. That work led to TikTok removing the keyword “IPTV”, which prevents the promotion of illegal IPTV services via this keyword on the platform
The organization’s experience as a Trusted Flagger under the EU’s Digital Services Act showed that online platforms’ handling of the obligations is deficient, which makes the processes for trusted flaggers unnecessarily resource-intensive. This applies, among other things, to the platforms’ handling of IP-related reports, where lack of feedback, long response times, low prioritization and large differences between the systems make the work of removing infringing content ineffective.
Further reading
Insights from our work to protect rights in 2025. Press release with link to report (in English). April 13, 2026. Danish Rights Alliance
Report: “Classic pirate sources” are widely used to train AI datasets, says Danish Rights Alliance. Article. March 20, 2025. by Steven Hawley. Piracy Monitor
