VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
The link between piracy and hypothetical profits has never been hard science, but when it comes to televized/streaming sports, a lot of this pirating seems to happen because people aren't allowed to watch it legally in their area.
This is a self-inflicted problem.
Right. What's your point? Virtually all media is available for free via consequence-free piracy, but generally at the cost of quality and convenience. I don't see that ever changing. Legitimate venders can provide a better quality product. That's how you sell, you become the preferred service by offering a better version at a price the customer is both willing and able to pay.
Customers don't have a problem, they can always get a form of the media they want if they are willing to pay in price or convenience.
aka Exclusivity right
> This is a self-inflicted problem.
By this, I don't mean businesses shouldn't put substantial weight on their profits, but rather that when push comes to shove you have to ask which matters more: profit or product? You will constantly be faced with some choice of sacrificing the quality of the product in favor of higher profits or sacrificing profits in favor of the product.
Certainty we want to maximize both, but this isn't always possible.
I think part of this has come through our runaway problem with shareholders and hyper fixation on the short term. Many shareholders are happy to trade product for profit because they believe they can exit during the market lag. It is statistical arbitrage. They have no interest in the long term value of a company or product, only until the time of exit.
It's worth noting that being too focused on the short term will damage the long term sustainability. Many times you have to put off profits today for profits tomorrow. That's the same problem. But there will be significant pressure against this if people driving don't care about tomorrow.
Every league should offer something akin to a season ticket "firehose" (all games streamed live with hosted replays) like MLS does on Apple TV or Gallagher rugby on the Rugby Network.
They've already crossed the threshold where this is no longer profitable. The next licencing deal will likely be so expensive, no Norwegian or Scandinavian company could possibly be able to turn a profit from it.
Of course, the CEO of the company has been in the media talking about how IPTV funds criminal networks and such nonsense*, calling for bans, yadda yadda. They're not listening to the market at all. Just using illegal streaming as a scapegoat. And I've decided, as long as this is how it's gonna be, they're not seeing a single dime of my money.
* I find the concept absurd. No matter where we spend our money, some of it ends up with criminals and various other despicable people, who will use it for evil. No one has the ability to prevent this. There's no reasonable expectation in current societal and economic structures for the consumer to somehow keep track of all their money once it leaves their wallet. This is no more the case for IPTV than it is when I buy a burger from some hole in the wall, which unbeknownst to me is a money laundering front. Or when I buy some chocolate and most of the money ends up with some white rich guy and not the children in Africa who harvested the cocoa. The whole argument is so intellectually dishonest and morally pathetic it pisses me off. And I don't even pay for IPTV.
Before this, it was much easier for ISPs / DNS providers / VPN providers to push back against governments wanting to censor the internet because the companies wouldn't have the tools installed to do this kind of blocking. The companies can then argue it is a burden to be forced to implement the tools. That is no longer the case in Europe, and the use of these tools is likely to expand outside the sports domain.
One must only imagine the outcome.
The question is exactly how much is copied, and how obvious it is.
That would only be true if human mental impressions were “fixed media” and therefore (potentially infringing) copies ubder copyright law the way data stored in electronic media in the course of AI training is.
Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't make sense, but either way the law can do it. The law doesn't have to follow first principles.
There's no rule anywhere saying we have to treat computer programs as if they're humans and extend them the same rights. Why would we do that? Says who?
Also, we don't do that, not with AI. We're not talking about paying AI for their labor, or giving them digital housing or something. We only care about the human rights we can extract profits from, other than that these are digital slaves.
Which, I'm fine with digital slaves. They're bits on a computer. But then we need to do that, and we can't be doing this whole "welllll they're basically people" bit we're doing with learning.
I don't think there's any "trying to have it both ways" with AI in this context. Copyright and labor laws are very different concepts.
I agree, with the similarity of course that both concepts are explicitly related to humans. Not machines or programs.
If we want to extend these concepts to machines or programs we can, but that's naturally complicated and there's a lot of questions about that. That, to me, needs to be a deliberate thing we do - not some foregone conclusion like people treat it. I mean, these people talk about AI fair-use as if it's obvious. It's not even obvious for humans...
If it is not, can I install a pirated Windows or Offiice version ? (I use it to train "AI")
For the same reason that I think it is (1) a bad idea to use an LLM to make your own OS, (2) when the AI is good enough to do that, it won't matter which OSes are or are not open-sourced, nor which OS's source code was used to train a model, as by that point the AI can make any OS for peanuts anyway — given those two points, I think the copyright holders fighting against their stuff teaching AI are missing the forest for the trees.
Streaming services have dramatically reduced piracy by making it way easier and way cheaper than ever before to consume content.
I don't live in Europe, but if it is like US sports, you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.
But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet.
It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. So you need an old-fashioned cable package to get it. The cost becomes ridiculous, just to watch hockey.
I would have gladly paid, but there was no opportunity.
Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem.
I dont watch soccer. But if you want to watch soccer with a decent exposure (national league, Champions league etc.) in some EU countries you pay easily 100 Euros. And for Europe, this is a lot!
The only streaming service I have left now is Netflix, which does work remarkably well, though how long they stay "ad free" remains to be seen. The first time they show me an ad, will also be the last time they show me an ad.
I still have Prime as a "bonus", though I wouldn't pay if it was removed because I only use it for The Grand Tour. Netflix was the first to go, as it was where I found the removal of content most annoying. It also decided to geoblock me on a 2019 trip to Japan: I had downloaded some shows, on my Canadian wifi, to my unrooted phone with a Canadian SIM card, with Canadian taxes paid on the subscription, and it still blocked access as soon as I was in Japan. That will never be an issue with self-hosting.
Disney+ is the one I'd like to cancel next - it's my partner's account and has just blocked her dad's access, but there's a lot of content I would need to self-host. I'm inspired to by a really annoying quirk of their app: if you put on a show, then fall asleep, reopen the app and the top choice will be "continue watching" which takes you straight back to playing where the app paused with the "are you still watching?" message. So to get back to the episode list, you need to fast forward through the entire episode and then choose "back to episode listing" in the 15 seconds before it goes to the next ep. Why the "continue watching" button doesn't just bring up the episode list is a mystery to me.
It’s not even that. Just to watch the games for one sport and one team requires this. “Remember, next week’s game is available exclusively on ShitStreamTV.” Of course, ShitStreamTV is a Brand New Streaming Network that you’ve never heard of and need yet another subscription for. Then they can’t actually handle the traffic and crash halfway through the game. Trying to get your $24.99 back? Impossible. “Terms of Service mumble mumble blah blah.”
As a consequence people have gone back to illegal streams where you can find all the sports on one menu.
If you're unwilling to sell it, then someone else will.
One well-known US show started airing the current season in the UK (on a streaming service) — 7 weeks after it started airing in the US.
Behind all these reasonably priced or easily accessible arguments for digital goods is the plain threat "Give it to me on my terms or else I simply take it for free"
They want people to pay to watch, and that’s fair. But if they make it too difficult, too expensive, or outright exploitative, they should fully expect that people will find ways to watch without paying them directly.
If you look for something cheap, AirVPN hast a sale going on: https://airvpn.org/ It works okay for me or my current needs.
mullvad vpn is double the price of AirVPN. And Astrill is double the price of mullvad vpn.
There's no good outcome if people don't fight for their internet freedom. In Russia the providers block OpenVPN and wireguard already. In China it's probably so much worse
Meanwhile Facebook stole all the books on the planet and it's not forbidden at all. It's very hard for me to take them seriously.
so using vpn provider with some other DNS provider should be enough
there is also tor that is free and cannot be controlled in this way
I believe Russia is doing it like this, trying to connect to a VPN provider's website will fail - interestingly NordVPN's app uses SSO to login, so blocking their main site would block the app's ability to log in.
*French shrug*
I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users. At the moment a French resident wanting to watch these games without paying can just install VPN, connect to it, and watch the pirate streams. If the VPN providers are forced to comply, having a VPS is still a viable option, but for a casual user it's complicated enough that it might be enough to significantly reduce the number of pirate-stream watchers.
Then again, because of Internet censorship in e.g. China, Iran and Russia, there are several services designed for a 1-click install of a personal VPN on a VPS...
This is always the excuse, but how does that ever work? People want to be able to do it, technical people know how to do it, non-technical people ask them to do it for them. If the number of non-technical people is large, a single one the technical people will make a one-click installer to automate it so they don't have to keep doing it manually for people, and then the inconvenience is gone for everyone.
The companies peddling this stuff are desperate to rationalize that it can do any good. A million games will have DRM and their customers will hate it and they'll collectively lose billions of dollars by inconveniencing legitimate customers or have people pirating their stuff out of spite when they would have actually bought it. Then some game doesn't get cracked for a while because it's a statistical anomaly or it's just not very popular and nobody bothers and they get to congratulating themselves without ever considering how many of the people who didn't pirate that game actually bought it instead of just pirating a different one, or if the number of people who bought it is smaller than the number of sales they lost through destruction of goodwill -- for not only that game but also all the games that were cracked right away.
And then they double down with this kind of website blocking overreach where they're unapologetically causing collateral damage to innocent people as if to demonstrate just how little they care about anything but the dubious pretense that it was worth it.
https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...
(Article from 2025, but last year it was already happening here)
VPN providers are bound to their homeland laws and can be ordered at anytime by law enforcement agencies or by judge rulings to provide whatever is needed, eavesdropping included.
Abroad VPN providers can be blocked with the same means.
So, unless you need VPN for lawful activities, you are just trying to fool around the law.
With that in place, I wonder if that could ever be abused by these pirate sites. Imagine temporarily pointing your pirate site domain name at a valid IP address. When you do that, in theory ISPs (and now VPNs) would automatically block perfectly valid IPs.
This would only happen if the owners of the pirate site domains actually try to do something malicious like that, but I know there are instances in the past of ISPs blocking cloudflare IPs (which is a separate issue, but the scenario I just made up reminds me of it).
Now, HTTP headers and SNI are both unencrypted, so oppressive governments abuse these. Obvious fix is to make'em encrypted by enforcing HTTPS everywhere and upgrading SNI to ESNI with DoH-obtained per-server public keys.
Some of offensive side fixes to the defensive side fix are: blocking ESNI, blocking DoH, forcing use of MITM proxy, just blaming strawman terrorist groups for having to block affected IPs. etc.
All this to protect some industry that is falling appart because they can't produce decent films or music anymore. Everything is calculated for profit and creativity is out the door. Meanwhile the small actual talented creators aren't protected and ripped off by the same industry that wants all the protections.
But in time, it will be as easy as installing Linux on a PS5.
I just hope unverified operating systems won't be blocked on similar grounds.
One is, you want to install Linux on your PS5. A PS5 is basically just a PC, so what are you getting out of that when you could much more easily just install Linux on a normal PC? The incentive to find a way to do it is low. Meanwhile the PS5 is manufactured by a company that doesn't want you to do it, so they make it take effort to do it.
The other is, people want to watch sports. Huge incentive. And they can use any device or service they want, not just one made by an adversarial company. Preventing this is basically having an effective censorship apparatus. The internet is an effective anti-censorship apparatus, because it connects everybody to everybody, and any single path through the network is enough to defeat censorship.
"We'll just block this path they're using over here" is like installing a single fence post in the middle of the ocean. Or worse than that, because that single fence post causes collateral damage to random innocent people (e.g. blocking Cloudflare IPs) which then gives those innocent third parties the incentive to start developing better anti-censorship tech.
No, you've actually missed his point entirely.
He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.
Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.
Piracy effectively ends at that point.
That level of dystopia is the sort of thing that could never last very long because enough people would rather burn it to the ground while still inside of it than allow it to continue to exist.
last time I checked, China didn't force users to give in their IDs and turn on webcams to authenticate themselves on the internet. France does.
dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
Isn't the entire premise here that people are instead using pirate services that presumably don't require you to upload your ID and film yourself with a camera?