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Comment by fivekarots | Hacker News Reader

In 2019, LaLiga mobile app turned on the mic and location to track bars showing matches without a license [1]. Protection data agency fined them with 250k EUR, but was overturned by the Supreme court in 2024 [2].

[1]: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/12/inenglish/15603... [2]: https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2024-07-27/el-supremo...

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It seems like the EU courts need to be involved in this case. Limiting internet to millions of people to make some people rich also flies too close to an human right violation in 2025 so maybe even ECHR can be involved.

They need to lecture these guys very seriously. La Liga is disrupting completely legit and business critical (probably in some cases safety critical) infrastructure, to.. combat piracy of entertainment content? The Spanish government is seemingly complicit. Feels like 2010 in some corrupt pseudo-democracy.

Tebas and PSOE in the same league? (no pun intended). I doubt it.

Lecture? They should be stripped of their intellectual property rights.

There’s a body of the law in the US called misuse of copyright/trademark that exists for this exact purpose.

If it were actually enforced, none of the major sports leagues or media ownership firms would hold any copyrights or trademarks anymore.

The judiciary in Spain is de facto controlled by the main opposition party (PP).

Both parties are exactly the same thing.

Sounds like the ISP shouldn't be blocking hosting providers that are known to honor narrower takedown orders?

The ISPs are compelled by judicial order to take down whatever LaLiga tells them to, and LaLiga is telling them to block the entire IP range. They can’t not do it.

From vague recollections of previous times this came up, I think this is downstream of the providers getting blocked refusing to cooperate though?

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.

Presumably there's no legal reason why the ISPs couldn't write to all their customers giving "notice of upcoming partial internet service outage, due to the actions of La Liga". It would be factually true

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

I think most of this are being done in the moment, without advanced warning. Plus, some ISPs carry soccer in their TV offerings so they’re probably not benefiting from speaking out. At least, my ISP does replace the blocked website with a notice explicitly stating that this is the result of a judicial ruling in favor of LaLiga

The EU is about to put an end to E2E and scan our messages which is a far worse human right violation.

Right now the EU is for regulation and total control.

It can feel a bit different with the unified authoritarian regime in the US now, however, working democracies have a juidacial branch just for this reason. Purely elected sovereigns usually have corruption and populism problems, having an semi-unelected bureaucracy is a must for democracy.

Hard to imagine this being legal and the fine is a slap in the face of those whose privacy had been compromised.

This should pose as an existential threat to companies behaving like that.

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