LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain
reclaimthenet.org
reclaimthenet.org
Even some online games on Steam stop working. I've seen also a several Twitch streamers who can't stream, startups down, etc.
We're basically hostages of this stupidity. And you know the funny thing? Football streams are working just fine. Now I feel morally obligated to watch pirated football and never pay them for it.
I live in the Netherlands and everyone here has accepted that a Dutch club will never again get into a Championship League finale. Every Dutch star is playing in Spain or England.
You’re still supporting the mob though.
Heck even the NFL is just standing around in line, walking through the metal detectors, and scanning your ticket.
Source: have gone to 2-3 dozen MLB and NFL games.
The last MLB game I saw (this summer) was a similarly easy process.
It's not sustainable and has to pop, but god damn is is resilient, even if it's kind of artificially.
Our clubs won't get any TV rights this season (or really peanuts, like €5M to L1's winner).
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Even in the US freedom of speech 'in the strong form' only exists until someone DMCA strikes for fair use with no recourse, or until a legal or federal agency is leveraged against you SLAPP style.
Some may not know how large ISPs connect to each other. If you're sufficiently large, you basically get to peer for "free". There are common peering points where most of this happens. Now, how does traffic travel between ISPs? WWell, routing protocols (notably BGP4) dictate how these connetions are used.
Thing is, providers can directly and indirectly throttle traffic with all this. A famous example is where several US ISPs, notably Verizon FiOS (from my own experience) to Netflix. There was a time about a decade ago where in the evening you could get <500kbps and Netflix was unwatchable. Verizon alternated between denying it and saying it was a technical limitation.
But lo and behold if you just used a VPN to bypass Verizon's routing and peering Netflix was completely watchable.
Many believe (myself included) this was intentional to try and kill Netflix and prop up their declining cable TV business.
Weekends? Do they specifically block the internet (or at least the websites mentioned in the article - GitHub, etc.) on weekends?
Blocking Cloudflare seems insane. That's a huge portion of the internet (for better or worse).
So, yes.
The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.
[1]: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/12/inenglish/15603... [2]: https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2024-07-27/el-supremo...
If it were actually enforced, none of the major sports leagues or media ownership firms would hold any copyrights or trademarks anymore.
I know when eSNI / ECH came out, Cloudflare at least made a point of taking about plans to use it to frustrate targeted blocks in hopes that governments would be unwilling to respond by escalating to blanket IP blocks.
Of course, LL could still give them hell in court even on false grounds (and maybe even win anyway, given the case detailed in the root comment). And in any case there's simply no commercial reason why they would stick their neck out in the first place
Right now the EU is for regulation and total control.
This should pose as an existential threat to companies behaving like that.
This situation (which has already been going on for a year or so) has made my attitude towards football change from "I don't like it, but live and let live" to outright hate.
But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. Oh but how will the poor millionaires break even with their overpriced streaming services if they can't destroy the internet to block some pirates? Jesus Christ, the audacity.
It's just generally good to try to understand others instead of distancing yourself from them. I find F1, jazz, finance, and so many other things to be really boring and uninteresting, but I try to get the people who like those and connect with them. F1 people and jazz people are often more interesting than their interests; I haven't gotten there with finance yet. The world is more interesting this way, but you're under no obligation.
> In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack.
In a just world LaLiga and FIFA would've been sued into the ground like five scandals ago, but I don't think gtowey was suggesting you try to empathise with them, but with people who like football.
Even at the peak of my interest in football here in Spain, when I was ~18 and I loved playing the game (actually indoor 5 on 5, much more technical and IMO “better”) there’s no way I could stomach a game between two mid or low tier teams, it had to have FC Barcelona and/or Real Madrid. But my dad and plenty others did and do watch those games.
Then there’s the worse aspect of it: football attracts the worst kind of people; think hooligans. I know a bunch of people smarter than me that love football so it’s not a matter of “if you like football you’re stupid” but “if you’re stupid you’ll probably like football”. Then there’s football becoming the whole personality of many guys here, you quite literally can’t talk about anything else with them.
Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs.
My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing)
About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
With foot/basketball, hockey, etc. there is no technical aspect if you don't get into pro tier shoe and ball design or whichever non-strictly rule defined straws one could competitively grasp at, but I guess most people relate through familiarity of actually playing it themselves? But there is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there where to play it well enough for it to be actually fun you need to already be a fan and have a good grasp of the rules, otherwise it's just people running back and forth on a court.
But for example, forcing a foul at just the right time, or causing offsides by positioning yourself, etc. those carry some level of strategy, at least how much I can grasp.
But the one common thing with every professional sport is the skill level for that particular skill in the sport is unlike anything we can comprehend.
I remember a friend recalling a professional baseball game he attended, and he described how those guys were warming up, and they were just playing catch to warm up their arms… they were able to throw the ball to within inches of the recipient’s glove every time from hundreds of feet away.
That sort of skill makes it enjoyable to watch human performance levels if you can appreciate how hard that particular skill is, especially if you’ve tried it.
Equivalents in F1 are how a race engineer will tell a driver to slow down by half a second over the course of a full lap to preserve their tires, and they more or less do it.
To me, that’s the technical aspects of soccer — watching the strategy play out, aside from where the ball is, or what the score is.
I was also surprised to hear the ref's conversation with the players (mic) in a rugby game on TV. Made it so much better to all the miming that goes on in football.
Also don't enjoy the ref slowly trotting across the field dramatically to go look at the video replay... Just get another ref to do it and report back or give the lead ref a damn phone to view it on.
In Soccer players are not generally penalised for pleading or arguing with the Referee - so an appeal to authority is the name of the game. In Soccer it involves performative diving in or around the box to try and earn a penalty, or get the marking player carded, all as a show to the Referee.
'Selling' falling fouls are a particular result of the 'advantage' rule however. Advantage means that if you are making a drive towards the goal and are fouled, but you stay on your feet and are continuing towards the goal, then you are deemed to be playing on the 'advantage' and the rules require the ref to not call the foul.
Thus, in real cases of foul, if you fall and exaggerate, the odds of the ref considering what they saw to be a foul are higher. The more you ham it up, the more likely thereafter that the Referee considers it suitably egregious to award a yellow or red card against the instigator. Even the top technical players of all time like Messi and Neymar are notorious for this.
Given there's no negative consequence to trying it on in Soccer, people will milk 30 seconds rolling around the ground to run down the clock or allow physios onto the pitch or the team to otherwise regroup. Sports like hockey have a specific penalty for this performative falling called embellishment.
Other examples of the 'dark arts' in Soccer include pretending to get elbowed in Aerial play, pulling on uniform to imbalance or slow a player, or even using your hands to keep a ball in play without the officiants seeing it. Even the best players in the world like Thierry Henry are not immune from doing this, as evidenced when France knocked Ireland out of the World Cup 2010 Playoffs due to Thierry Henry's handball in the 13th minute of extra time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Republic_of_Ireland_v_Fra...
In Rugby only the Captains generally communicate with the Referee, and the onus is on polite and respectful dialogue and obeying the Referees word as final. Therefore in Rugby its less about gaining advantage with the Referee and more about disadvantaging the opponent. Thus they do things differently - things like raking players when on the ground - the deliberate scraping of an opponent's leg or arm with the studs of boots to cause injury - and biting, gouging, headbutting in the Ruck, pinching or punching when tackling, and thrusting when handing-off players so as to effectively punch them.
One may come off as more machismo or honorable than the other, but both are simply signifiers of poor sportsmanship and attempts to circumvent the mechanisms that attempt to make the games in question as equitable as possible. If anything, seeing the likes of Brian O'Driscoll get spear-tackled vs Arjen Robben chewing scenery all around him, the Rugby equivalent is exponentially more damaging to the players and the game.
People watch sports because it gives them an emotional investment in something that has a new result each week, is not scripted and shows incredible skill and fitness.
It's also a lot healthier than the people who follow politics like sport. They get moral when their team loses.
Do you watch TV, Internet videos, film, or read books ?
That's just another form of entertainment.
Like this most recent F1 race, the main thing I cared about was that the Williams team got on the podium (1st, 2nd, or 3rd). Because they were a hugely successful team in my childhood, so I wanted to see them succeed again after 15 years of horrible performance, often finishing absolutely last.
Next week, it might be another narrative I latch onto during the race. It absolutely is entertainment for me. I rarely ever care about any single team.
There are two championships:
- The Drivers Championship (given to the driver that scored the most points in a season)
- The Constructors Championship (given to the team that scored the most points, but it's really rewarding the team/engineers for essentially building the best car)
The MotoGP guys are far more fit - they have to use their bodies as counter ballast to make the curves. That's why MotoGP races are so short, they're at the limit of human endurance.
Look up any of these guys' gym routines
I don't think it ever got to that point in F1, but CART (now IndyCar, but that's a different discussion) had to cancel a race because drivers were blacking out due to sustained G forces.
Well, I can't say outright that we should remove most of the rules and limits on things like doping and so on...
Planning around rule interpretations is part of the strategy (if you’re good) (usually)
What irks me are the grown, drunk people that get infected with hatred towards the other team and its fans.
I appreciate watching e.g bouldering competitions now simply because I can appreciate the difficulty more.
Had I stuck with playing football I imagine I would have had a similar experience now.
For example. I don't understand how: - moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal - Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal - Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. I know many people who used to pay for it; now most of them, including law-abiding citizens who wouldn't normally pirate, are learning how to do it.
It's not only become expensive, but they've also been split up by multiple providers. You want to watch the league games? That's one subscription. Champions League? That's another subscription. Chamipions League on a Tuesday? Need Prime for that. So, much like movie/series streaming has been split up between services, so have the football broadcasts. No wonder people are pirating the streams, when the availability is much better a fraction of the price.
On the other hand, the MLS went to basically a single provider (all matches air on Apple's streaming service, with select on terrestrial TV and/or cable), and the numbers on that are still reportedly somewhat soft if you ignore the skewing presence of Lionel Messi (but that's a whole other discussion, because Apple was also trying to do something different and overpaid for the rights to do so, and that overpay was a part of bringing in Messi).
In 2025, Optus suffered a network outage that prevented emergency calls (triple-0 in Australia) for nearly 14 hours. During this period, four people died, including an eight-week-old baby. The outage was reportedly caused by a botched firewall upgrade that affected up to 600 households in South Australia alone.
https://7news.com.au/news/optus-deaths-firewall-upgrade-repo...
In any case, depending on Cloudflare for emergency services seems an extraordinarily stupid idea.
I have personally sent letters to everyone, including the court that ruled and allowed this whole mess. The judge in question must be either extremely incompetent or corrupted. The court response to this problem wasn't acknowledging it, but to double down, because it seems like some egos were hurt.
The only way I can imagine this situation stopping is by someone dying from a core healthcare system malfunctioning and a court case becoming viral. In the meantime, a single private institution can destroy the internet whenever they want, with full legal backup. Just insane.
> The "3pm blackout" rule prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays.
> The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force.
> The blackout comes into effect when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00.
Have this: https://hayahora.futbol/ on my bookmarks every time some site doesn't respond.
Or just feed them a never ending series of cloudflare turnstile captchas.
Not just LaLiga, but pretty much any and all busineses and politicians in Spain. Bring the problem to all of Spain and let them figure out who screwed the pooch to end up with Spain back into the dark ages.
Of course, that will only work once.
You can claim copyright on anything anywhere, things get taken down, zero responsibility if it was wrongful, be it laliga streams, be it youtube copyright strikes or whatever?
If there was a law, that if you took down something that you shouldn't have taken down (eg. hundreds of pages), you should be liable for all the damages and income loss for those pages. Same for youtube... copyright strike, proven fair use.. now pay for the lost income of the creator, the creator (webmaster, ...) did nothing wrong, you should be liable for that.
I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them. Why can't I do it with the digital variant?
Largely I feel like the response to this is a rephrasing of 'because no one will be able to monetize the creation of entertainment'. But that's not a moral reasoning, that's a choice of how to foster a market. Which undermines the explanation of this being about piracy. We can try other ways of growing a market that doesn't inhibit an intuitive natural urge to share.
Wait, can you? In the US and EU, physical copies are for personal use only. Where are you that this would be legal?
The selective enforcement exposes to me that it doesn't really have a ethical leg to stand on.
Not sure where you live but yeah they do, in France they even asked a school to pay for the kids singing a song, they make hairdressers pay, they absolutely would ask a funeral to pay.
Regardless, no one will magically show up and break arbitrary cd player functionality like they are remotely disrupting Internet access if someone pirates la Liga.
you're saying if any thing is legal it's impossible, and if any thing is possible it's never legal
Once upon a time, ASCAP would show up at your small-town record shop and make you pay under threat of lawsuit.
I can't mass print/burn/copy copyrighted works, but the key word here is 'mass'.
Copyright is based on economic cost/benefit, not natural rights.
But you can't buy them there.
Sure, you can buy them (cheaply) somewhere else and re-sell in the destination country, but you can't do it affordably at scale.
Purely digital files are so cheap to copy that cost is negligible.
Recreating “physical share” functionality in digital space takes work ($$) for $company and directly leads to less sales.
I think a good moral reasoning would be to think of it like ticket sales. You pay to get in. The event organizers take on risk and expense to run the show. Rebroadcasting is like sneaking people in.
A related issue that suggests that the copyright system is broken is that it isn't equally enforced everywhere. The rest of the world freely copies books, drugs, and tech in any way they please, so all it does in the end is inflate prices for U.S. consumers, who effectively subsidize the rest of the world.
I was ridiculous : 2.5 providers for the league (Canal+ with their "sports" pack for some games + Bein Sport), RMC Sport for the euro cups, Eurosport for the French Cup, and Infosport+ (a Canal+ channel but not included in their sports pack, go figure), the total was close to 115€/month (that's close to a full month of salary at minimum wage). All with a 12-months subscription, even if the channel (like Eurosport or Infosport+) may not broadcast one single game of the team (related to cup draws).
20 years ago, you could watch ALL French football with only TF1/FR2/FR3 (free TV Channels) and Canal+ for €30/month.
When the LFP decided to split games to different broadcasters, everything started to go South. And this year, they couldn't find any broadcaster for the league, so they had to create their own channel, which can broadcast only 8 games per match day, since Bein still has a contract for the 9th one.
Hence I said "against".
It is astonishing the court systems for those countries to allow this if, other than maybe football factors into their GDP (which says something about the nation, maybe they should find something more useful to produce). Just for some silly sports event watching man-children kicking balls around.
I grew up in the US as sports were just something on tv, but this is practically holding the nation hostage as though it were a religion, and the world should stop just so they can sell tickets for the only one god, theirs.
Not sure if roaming always tunnels your traffic back to SIM’s country of origin or not.
But good idea using foreign SIM, although I'll probably need residential proof or probably have to give a blood sample at this rate.
The situation is a bit irregular, as the streaming providers set up a new website for each game, and the legal system isn't fast-moving enough to issue a court order banning a website within the 90 minutes of a football game. Instead La Liga got a 'dynamic blocking injunction' so they tell ISPs what to block, and ISPs have to block it.
Then they can just ban this customer. That way the authorities will not have a reason to ban IP ranges affecting the other customers.
But aside from it, it should be very obvious: A) you are notified by the intellectual property holders that somebody is streaming pirated content, B) a specific customer or set of customers, who are not a known streaming service, are serving tens or hundrends of IPs with video and C) these customers do not have much activity during other times.
Plenty of people stream commentary to matches without showing the game itself, so that would flag as guilty too
In theory someone might rent a server and do the streaming directly to his viewers, without using a known platform. This would be a legitimate false positive as you describe. But this would be so expensive I doubt anyone would do it when the alternative is a free platform with built in community and monetisation tools.
Cloudflare is not ignoring LaLiga and they are open to collaborate, but LaLiga refuses to do so, and are battling legally over it.
thanks. this sucks.
EDIT: “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell [0]
[0] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...
The issue isn't "some people don't pay for sports streams". The issue is that some corporate fucktards have managed, through the power of lobbying, backroom deals and blatant corruption, to get an engine of country-wide internet censorship to be created - and then abused on their behalf.
This isn't the first, or the tenth, time it happens. People should have been sued, fired and jailed after the first time they blocked the entirety of Cloudflare for inane "copyright" reasons - and yet, nothing was done, and the censorship persists.
Just because you’ve been abused doesn’t give you the right to be a riled up aßhole to anyone that triggers your emotions.
Yeah are you new to swear words?
A distinction clear to those with long familiarity to swearing and swear words.
I am incredibly pissed off about any attempt to enact Internet censorship - whether political or corporate in nature. And so should be you.
Watching football has become really expensive in the last decade and people are fed up.
Also, sometimes you need different subscriptions to watch all the games of your team.
Meanwhile, piracy is cheap and convenient.
https://base.speccy.org/ProyectoBASE_Historia.html
The parent comment confuses Spain and Italy as if they were the same... as if Spain didn't had French and UK influences from the North at all since the 1600's and before... yeah sure.
Spain had and has picaresca as the Italians, of course... but we aren't 100% the same and it shows off. We used to buy legal games in the 80's because the prices plumetted down because of the piracy, and between the shaddy game loaders and having to wait 15 minutes per load, everyone wanted at least to buy one or two original games in order to play something without losing literal hours trying to tweak the casette player.
Italy in the meanwhile just resold foreing games as if they were local. Some Spaniards did the same too; but it had small powerhouses as Aventuras AD, Erbe Software and such, not just a few by any means.
Example, July 1986 [0]: "Nine Madrid university students involved in a thriving pirated video game business"
--
0: https://www.abc.es/archivo/periodicos/abc-sevilla-19860718-40.htmlEven my elementary school had DOS PC's with 5,25 floppies with Spanish and Basque translated games, even Logo... that in mid 90's.
On Copyright... I'm pretty sure Spain was bound to the Berna convention.
And, on piracy, in the 80's (in Spanish, your browser can translate it): https://www.retrogameshistory.com/2021/03/la-pirateria-espan...
LOL, what did you smoke, man?
Having seen how Sweden changed their copyright law in response to the Pirate Bay website [2], I wish everyone knew that it wasn't always this way, and that states maintain their own rules. The idea that "no one shall copy any corporation's media, ever" is a recent propaganda success.
[0] https://www.mondaq.com/copyright/14472/technology-protection...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_file_sharing
Compiled software is not copyrightable in any country that I know of. Compilation is not an original creative process. The original software is copyrightable, and compiling it creates a (protected) derived work of it.
> I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.
The Pirate Bay is censored in Spain as much as it is on France.
I live in what my TV provider called a "dead zone".
I live in the NBA's "broadcast zone" for the Portland Trail Blazers. That means even with League Pass, I cannot watch their home games, because I am meant to watch them on my local TV provider.
But guess what, I don't live in the Seattle TV zone. So I don't have a local/any station that broadcasts Blazers game.
And the NBA doesn't care either. "Sure, you can only watch half of your team games, sucks to be you."
We have a similar anti piracy shield and once we got some Google cdn down for half an hour. Imagine not being able to use Google drive because the football league is trying to block football piracy streams - which are trivially searchable online anyway
As a result, people cancel their subscriptions. To recuperate some of the losses, Viaplay now licenses one match every weekend to a third party streaming service, this year it is on Amazon Prime.
So, now besides the high cost and shoddy service, you suddenly need an additional streaming subscription to be able to view every match. Granted, the streaming on Prime is excellent though.
This weekend, the Prime match was Liverpool v Everton, which as a Dutchie is the most interesting match of the weekend (given Liverpool's title win last season, the Dutch trainer and several outstanding Dutch players).
Several friends of mine who are into football immediately quit their Viaplay subscription, so who knows how many matches will not be streamable through Viaplay next season?
As a legit customer you are constantly chasing an ever shifting landscape of poor quality and overpriced services. Meanwhile with an IPTV subscription you pay little, get high quality streams and have access to _all_ content.
Paid Streaming or TV is quite expensive. It's mostly because you have to buy the whole package which includes everything else the company provides. Like Golf or Nascar or whatever they find on ESPN 8.
Also paying for a stream only really benefits the rich clubs. The money la liga earns for tv rights is split between professional teams with Barcelona and the two Madrids receiving about 30% of the money. The other 17 teams get the rest. Some fans don't want to see them getting more money (small percentage but never underestimate fans)
Oh wait, you cannot do that. You have to pay for all the championship together with the Champions League and what not.
You may only want to focus on the rights violations but that doesn’t make the history and reasons irrelevant.
In addition the cost only went upwards while the offering reduced every season as Dazn and other players entered the field. I said goodbye to soccer a few years prior to Covid.
This is just for La Liga games, you'll need to pay extra if your team plays in other competitions.
Their choice to infinitely segment sports broadcast results in piracy.