- Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
- The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions.
- La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect if the sound matches with that of a football match. In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located. That way they can locate bars and other establishments where football is being pirated or showed without paying for the bar package.
Still amazes me this just sort of went by and no one really seemed bothered. Absolutely insane.
> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid.
Applies to all venues and events. Bars, restaurants, grocery shops, barbers, sports events, concerts, taxis, lounges, everything with an audience.
I don't want to say it's the same everywhere in the EU, but I have always assumed it's a common concept in most western countries at least.
In most EU countries private copying levies are paid to the copyright mafia any time you purchase a hard drive, printer or even a blank cassette. Because you know, you might copy something using it.
It's not the same everywhere in the EU, but here in Poland as an establishment owner you have to pay this fee to an agency that purports to represent the musicians. As you describe eg. Spotify in background.
This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.
The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.
AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.
This is common in many countries around the world.
I’m sure the prices have gone up since that comment, but 200€/month actually seems very reasonable for a commercial bar that shows sporting events. That’s let’s than 7€/day and would be more than covered by the first group of people walking in the door and buying a round of drinks.
I don’t approve of the microphone activation spying stuff or the ridiculous internet blocking. However it’s also kind of bizarre that it reached this point when the monthly fees for bar owners were such a trivial amount.
Private corporations acting like police, engaging in illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping at massive scales to detect and punish crimes as defined by themselves.
Often it’s not. Back when Sony put a Windows rootkit on autorun on music CDs just in case someone wanted to rip a FLAC, that was a felony violation of the CFAA in the US. The big difference is consent. If I use your app to watch a game and the conditions of using your app include giving you microphone access, that’s legal. If you breach my phone to turn on the mic and listen to me, that’s illegal.
So if someone for example, adds a statement to T&C that as a payment for use of software, the user consents to collecting of a sequence of pressed keys (including 16-digit numbers) and selling them on the black market to whoever is interested, it becomes legal?
No, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers.
In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
La Liga are presumably muxing infrasonic audio into their residential streams to try and:
(a) watermark the residential account(s) used to provide the streaming services so they can prosecute the providers
(b) Detect commercial usage of residential accounts used in piracy to prosecute the venues, by listening out via the App.
They could presumably get around GDPR by virtue of the fact they're only listening and recording audio out of human audible range, and only for identification of copyright infringement as per the TOS of the La Liga App.
Presumably then La Liga investigates the bar in-person. Or waits until X reports have occurred over Y duration and THEN have someone investigate in-person.
>In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
I assume the pint glass pops up at intervals that the investigators would know and the general public would not, so you'd need some kind of central service with someone watching the commercial stream and showing/hiding the pint glass at the right intervals. In which case it would make more sense to operate a central service just pirating the commercial stream, which I'm sure does happen and does get shut down.
Legally, you mean? Because I'd say most reasonable people would say a literal wire on your phone is pretty personal. Location is PID too if they store the data at all
The escape hatch with all personal data processing is "legitimate interest". Consent is a big part of it, but an industry with sufficiently deep legal pockets would likely go down the route of "legitimate interest" if cornered.
I'm not a legal professional. I just work next to this stuff.
That's not what legitimate interest is supposed to mean though.
Legitimate interest is about collection of data necessary to operate your service.
Listening to detect if someone in a user's surrounding is showing a match without license has nothing to do with the function of the application. There's no legitimate interest there.
I think a lot would depend on whether they do any kind of on-device processing to determine whether the audio is likely to be a football match or not. I think they could successfully argue that data processed on your phone and not shared with them is processed by you, and then they could argue that the data that is shared falls under legitimate interests and would be proportionate, and pass a balancing test.
Are we sure ? I'm not disputing it, but is geo location alone as a data point covered GDPR ?
I'll have to look that up, but as someone else said it's only enforced at EU member state level, however there is another central oversight to ensure it's enforced.
Not if you have no possible way to identify the person to whom it is related (this includes server logs etc). Theoretically, an event sent to a server with some GPS co-ordinates, with no metadata and no logs stored on the server at all could perhaps be found not to be personally identifiable.
This is almost certainly a thought experiment though, the amount of engineering effort required to ensure no logs of any kind could result in deriving the IP address of the user would be high, and they’re probably not doing it (even if they are actually not sending any identifying information directly).
You might also find that you have to take special care to avoid creating circumstances that allow inference of personal information. For example, sampling every night at 11pm, you’re very likely to be able to determine an address or approximate location of the subscribers home.
Yes. Personal data under GDPR is "any information which are related to an identified or identifiable natural person". If it's data about a specific person, it's personal data, it's a very straightforward definition. Businesses need either informed consent or legitimate interest to store or process it.
I would never agree to this. But it doesn't strike me as particularly unethical, either. So long as both parties understand what they're agreeing to, this seems perfectly fine.
If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.
I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since one on of the main selling points for streaming is to not have to pay for a bundle of things you mostly don't want to be able to get the few things you do), but it assumes that people will never be traveling and unable to watch the games locally even if they do normally have access to it. My dad frequently travels for work, and he pays for the streaming service mostly to be able to watch Phillies games despite living in the Boston area, but the blackout rules mean that he can't even watch the Red Sox games with the streaming service if he's traveling outside of Boston. He also can't watch the Phillies games when they play the Red Sox in Boston, which is mostly fine, but it's still a little weird since he'll be have to watch the Red Sox broadcast (and therefore their commentators) rather than the Phillies one he's used to seeing for their games. The games that are given special slots on ESPN also tend to be blacked out for everyone, so that also causes issues for people wanting to stream them even if it's not a local game. The whole model seems to be more about trying to railroad people in paying for a less convenient, more expensive product even when they actively want to pay for something that's actually available but artificially limited. I don't get why anyone would be surprised that people just turn to "piracy" when things work like this.
Why doesn't he just save himself the time, money and hassle and just watch the highlights or highlight clips.
I understand why the NFL is going the stream route given how popular it is already. They can afford to inconvenience people. But MLB has been stagnant or declining for so long. You'd think they'd make their content more accessible to grow the fan base.
I think he enjoys having the entire game on in the background. He's partially switched over to listening to the radio broadcasts for games, which apparently are often provided online as well (which makes sense, given nothing really needs to change in terms of how they make money to provide it online instead of via a radio station).
What's weird to me is that the MLB does seem to genuinely be trying to make changes in terms of gameplay to try to keep relevant (especially around reviews for on-field calls, but also in terms of some of the changes in recent years that were controversial but seem to have produced meaningful results in reversing some of the creep in how long it takes for games to finish), and my understanding is that they basically were the first major sports league in the US to invest in streaming technology, to the point where I remember reading that the NHL app (and maybe some of the others) were originally developed and maintained by MLB's programmers as well. I'm not sure how they've managed to fall so far behind in terms of streaming experience; the most apparent difference is that the baseball season is over ten times as many games, which presumably could have some sort of effect on things, but my naive expectation would be that it would incentive having a stable infrastructure for this even more. Maybe it's just a matter of them being able to get away with blocking some games because there are still so many others that don't get blocked during the rest of the season? With only 16 games in a regular season, blocking even one of them might just be something viewers are less willing to put up with.
> I'm not sure how they've managed to fall so far behind in terms of streaming experience
It's because they need to keep the broadcasters and the teams happy and broadcasters want to have exclusive content. In some markets, teams want local blackouts to help get butts in seats.
The whole copyright institution seems pretty unethical to me. It's wild that someone can own the royalties to a particular piece of content for 70+ years after the original creator dies (at least that's the law in the US, I assume similar elsewhere), and that the creator can unilaterally name his price for licenses to that content (you can't even know if you want the content without first paying for a license to consume it) and then if you want to put the content into a different format (for example, if you own an HD Blu-Ray and want to put it on a hard drive) you effectively have to pay for a _new license_ for the same content. This is just scratching the surface of the ethical bankruptcy associated with intellectual property.
In Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy).
To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of twenty years ago).
The major effect of this is that newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents.
These people are trying to milk a cow that will be dry in less than 5 years, unless a major revolution happens in FIGC (Italian Football Federation).
> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly
Same in Germany.
> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football
Also the same in Germany.
But I am not sure which direction the causality goes. Maybe people are less interested in football because of the shenanigans they are constantly pulling. Or maybe they try to squeeze the remaining audience because people are less interested. It may also not be related at all.
Most leagues face the same issue: just one to three wealthy clubs dominate, winning around 70–80% of the time, which makes the competition less exciting. The German Bundesliga is one of the starkest examples: Bayern Munich has taken 16 of the last 20 titles.
Because of ridiculous transfer rules & markets - if these would be killed, there would be much more competition, and it was that way, 20-30+ years ago....
You can see this in most everything: 5 companies dominate IT, 3 companies dominate sodas, 3 companies dominate credit cards, etc. I think it is a byproduct of the way our current system works.
What pisses me off over here, is that for some strange reason, well not strange rather the whole thing that is being discussed, we hardly get any matches on the radio, whereas in the south this is a given, even in Spain.
It is always some streaming service like Magenta Sport, and that's it.
I think it’s most likely that football is honestly a bit shit, and there are many better things to do for entertainment that don’t require mortgaging a kidney to watch.
try going to germany, where you can get a season ticket at top club for a few hundred euros.
i think Bayern Munich's cheapest season ticket is like $200 at the current exchange rate. that's manageable. i've paid more than that for a single NFL game in OK-ish seats.
Come on dude it's on the same page just below the initial summary which seems to be the only thing you bothered to read. It's even big bullet pointy for the attention starved...
>> German men’s football remains the most attended sport in the country by far. It is also a key driver of the overall attendance figures, with the top three professional leagues alone accounting for 46% of the growth since 2017/18.
Born and raised in England, the nation of football, and I loathe football. The hooligan shenanigans we cause in other countries pisses me off. There is no respect.
I got pushed on the subway the other day because of some local match. Some drunken twat thought I was someone who supported the rival opposition and nearly dragged me off the opposite escalator. I can't wait for football to die, I partake in sports too, I sword fence.
While I can't vouch if it's the same for other countries where football isn't their thing. Generalizing for example Canada and Ice Hockey. But when I was in Canada coincidentally when national matches the vibe was holy different to that of Brits and football.
What pisses me off is that they've said (in Germany) that they are trying to avoid monopolies and the rights need to go to multiple rights owners. Instead of giving the same rights to multiple broadcasters as would be normal for real non-monopolies, they split up the rights and gave each part to a single broadcaster. Which means, the full broadcasting rights are held by multiple parties, e.g. it's not a monopoly, but each broadcaster has a monopoly over his part of the cake. Which means if you want to have the whole cake as a fan, you need to pay the cartel, i.e. all broadcasters at once.
In Ireland it's closer to €200/month just for Soccer depending on who you support. As a result 1 in 5 homes in Ireland admit to having a 'dodgy box' - i.e. an android or SoC box capable of running an IPTV Subscription pirating live Digital TV and various streaming services. These are usually sold as an annual subscription for €50-100 in pubs and on places like facebook marketplace.
The Irish Legal Community has already raised issues with how Sky is going about tracking down infringement at the user level, as they have an appalling record in this area and are likely to try and emulate the egregious situation in Spain to mitigate or retaliate.
What's even more ridiculous is the "3pm blackout" rule which prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00. The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force even in the globalised streaming era. Sadly the rights-holders can't be bothered splitting the package for Ireland, so we get to pay more for SkySports and still have to buy additional services.
In short, piracy is always a service issue. As a soccer fan going legit you'd possibly need to maintain a Sky Sports, BT Sport, TNT Sports and Premier Sports subscription. God forbid you want screen-casting support or 4K resolution.
In Ireland you STILL can't purchase/watch UFC PPVs as one-offs, there isn't a way for you to watch it legally the next day or live as a single event. The only way would be to get a subscription to a big provider like SkyTV or NOW!
Best way to watch sports now is to go to a bar that broadcasts it. If you have a drink, it only costs you 5EUR/match. Maybe you watch 5-6 matches a month, so still cheaper than 100EUR/month and you get drinks and service included.
They pulled the plug on the project almost right away.
Apparently, it had something to do with YouTube not being able to limit the live stream to Southeast Asian countries without it leaking to the rest of the world—where you’d need a pricey subscription to watch the game.
Anime has long had a model where shows are ‘free’ (historically, on broadcast TV) and the money comes from sales of disks, manga, and other merchandise. (On the other hand, Japan has copyright laws that make the US look laid back.)
Yeah, it's hilarious that, on the same planet, we have articles like "Nine things I learned in ninety years" come out, while the courts of an EU country give "LaLiga," which appears to be a private corporation (a football company), the authority to ban any IPs they want arbitrarily, for everyone, country-wide. People just don't care any more, if ever did.
Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?
What complicates it is that the ISP, Telefonica, is also a Soccer rights-holder.
How they haven't sued La Liga for defamation is beyond me though; publicly condemning Cloudflare's role in enabling piracy by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit.
Traditionally all soccer organisations from FIFA down are absolutely rife with corruption and other criminal activity. Best to view current events through that lense. For example, Fifa in 2015 were done for bribery, fraud and money laundering to corrupt the issuing of media and marketing rights for FIFA games in the Americas, estimated at $150 million.
If you're a Cloudflare customer who suffers damages when LaLiga obtains a DNS block for Cloudflare IPs used for pirate streams, you'll have better chances suing Cloudflare for failing to provide the service you're paying them for (of course if you're on a free plan, you don't have much of a leg to stand on).
One Cloudflare customer doing something illegal is only able to cause this much collateral damage because Cloudflare is set up so that taking down one customer requires taking down most of their infrastructure. But what works for DDoS protection doesn't work so well for legally mandated blocks. I think at some point Cloudflare will have to start kicking pirate streams off their platform faster if they want to stay up.
I'm not an ardent defender of Cloudflare by any means, but there is no grounds to sue Cloudflare. Their service is up. Their IP ranges are getting blocked by residential ISPs. How would that be Cloudflare's fault?
Because the reason they are getting blocked is because of the actions Cloudflare is taking. If cloudflare would stop streaming these pirate broadcasts, the blocking would stop. These blocks are not just random.
To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price. Though some significant shows often end up locked on random services unfortunately.
those pirated anime (esp. speed subs) mostly also just steal the crunchyroll subtitles as well, so if it was awful there, it will be also awful in the pirated version!
To get subs in my language I do have to go to go-anime. Which is btw pretty bad (sometimes you have to reload 30 times before something starts, summaries are wrong, no chromecasting, etc.)
The main reason I don't watch any one it is because it's all locked away under expensive subscriptions and I don't really live in a place with great football matches, so yeah...I'd actually be into it if it was accessible, I just couldn't be bothered figuring out how to watch it, nor can I afford 100 euroes a month.
So it looks like a self resolving problem? As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear, and hopefully kids will be encouraged to do more creative activities than kicking a ball.
Sport is good and team sport is better. A "lifestyle guru" should know that. Kicking a ball is maybe the lowest entry barrier sport in many countries. I'm from latin america and here you grow playing fútbol. Find a ball, gather your friends and you're ready to go.
Given your username I wouldn't expect such harsh sentiment about people who enjoy playing football. I would prefer my kids play a sport they enjoy than sit on an iPad all day. But I'm not a lifestyle guru.
> As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear,
You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions? They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme. If you've hanged out with people who are proud to be hooligans and ultras today, you'd see how removing football wouldn't get them to stop.
> You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions?
It is not an outlet for emotions that would need to be expressed similarly. It on itself creates emotions and social structures that make those expressions violent.
> They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme.
Some of them will, some of them wont. They wont be in such a large pack in the same place at the same time. There will be less peer pressure to participate in these groups on young men and less validation.
On the other hand kids (and adults) not getting enough exercise is a modern health crisis. More kids kicking a ball would be significant improvement over current status quo of kids staring at brainrot.
agree. im american and i see a bunch of youth in major cities who are clearly unhealthy.
sport should be encouraged. i get that not everyone likes it, and not everyone will enjoy it (and even fewer will be good enough to actually enjoy it), but encouraging physical activity instead of playing on phones is a good thing.
i was a nerd growing up (still am) and i sucked at sports (still do). i still enjoyed doing them and knew that physical activity was beneficial.
Kick a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, jump over the ball, stick a ball somewhere. A ball, a stick, a ring, a board. I hate that football is the default sport and was forced myself to play it in my childhood.
Look, I disliked football for the reason that it made me an outcast. All males in my class in elementary school played football on a regular basis. I did not. It made me associate more with another guy (only 1, yeah) and girls. It made me just pick up a book and read while others were playing sports (happened to be football).
... but I did make myself an outcast as I was growing up as I would rather use my PC (for programming) than go outside.
It is the default sport because the barrier to entry is basically having a ball. Random rocks, backpacks, whatever you have can serve as the goalposts.
Most other sports require other equipment too (volleyball needs the net, basketball the hoop, etc. etc.).
It's also easy to understand, and being the most popular sport by far in most countries, allows for an easy appropriation to a community and sense of belonging.
> was forced myself to play it in my childhood
So you're just trauma dumping your childhood issues?
also football can be played in basically any number, from 1:1 to 11:11, which means you can go out with a ball, meet one other kid and play, and random other kids can just join in.
I've literally seen kids unable to speak with each other because of different languages able to join a match :)
I was terrible at football as a kid so it's not like it did much for me, but one cannot deny how universal the game is.
It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!).
Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.
The amount of resources that goes into soccer in many countries is really astonishing. It can be seen as a modern equivalent to bread and circuses however.
Access to the IP address detailed below has been blocked in the United
Kingdom by court order.
The block will apply to:
IP Address: 95.217.118.31
For all Premier League Match Periods Until: 07 Dec 2020
Further notifications will not be sent about this IP address unless and
until further infringements are detected after the date and time indicated
above, though the IP address will remain subject to blocking until then. If
your organisation is planning to reallocate this IP address to another
customer before the date listed above, please notify us at
ipallocation@friendmts.com with the appropriate information so that we can
consider releasing the IP from subsequent blocking.
Yes, we know. Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?
Internet mostly works in Spain when there is a match: one can see traffic figures from the mayor exchange points: they are unaffected.
Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry.
Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks.
Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
> Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
I think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because:
1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.
2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.
3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
Apparently it's not being communicated properly, or you don't actually read what you come across, because "Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches" isn't true at all.
Large parts are blocked, yes, as collateral damage. But it doesn't seem like they're completely switching it off, as obviously then there would be huge protests, mostly because people wouldn't be able to legally watch the games then!
I might be naive, but this is absolutely outrageous. What laws allow a private company dictate what IPs can be banned across an entire country? Are the ISPs voluntarily cooperating or are they now all obliged to follow LaLiga requests?
ISP with the right to football goes to court to report themselves (not a joke) about piracy happening in their networks.
An old man judge which understand technology as much as I understand biochemistry (nothing) decides that they need to stop piracy, His solution is to give laliga the power to block those illegal streams, that all ISP must comply for the time that a match exist. The judge covers himself by saying, that the blockage can't affect third parties.
All ISP happy comply. It does affect third parties.
Cloudflare (third party) puts a recourse to say that it is affecting their business. The very same old man, decides, that is not going to proceed with that investigation.
So cloudflare needs to to through a different slower legal procedure.
Meanwhile, we have a company with the authority to block what they want thanks to corruption.
Tribunals. But notice that a possible outcome here is that _Cloudflare_ gets mandated by the same tribunals to perform the blocking of sport streaming sites.
Football is wild. Imagine countries and governments collect taxes.
Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar.
Then Qatar spends €262 millions on a single football player and gazillions on a European club, which is at €889 million loss over the last five years
In the end, who is paying for it all? Ordinary people ultimately foot the bill – whether through higher energy prices, taxes, or the opportunity cost of that money leaving the productive economy – while the football circus rolls on.
Fair point, governments don't literally wire tax money straight to Qatar for oil.
But whether it is at the pump or through subsidies, it is still ordinary people who end up carrying the cost — and that money gets recycled into football vanity projects.
I mean, if you're going to consider indirect transactions too, eventually every part of the economy ends up affecting every other part. That money that goes into those projects doesn't just vanish, it gets spent and flows back out into the economy.
From a wider perspective it does vanish in terms of productive value: billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle, instead of going into things that improve lives (cheap energy, infrastructure, innovation, public goods)
>billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle
"Club losses"? If you pay a football player 100k to play a match, even if the point of the match is nothing but spectacle, that money doesn't evaporate. The player will spend it on the economy. What else could he possibly do with it besides spending it or tossing it in a fire? If a club spends 10M on something entirely frivolous -- say, a giant concrete football -- that money also doesn't simply disappear, it's used to pay the people who will make the raw materials and the people who will design and build the thing. Only individuals and distinct entities lose money. An economy never does.
The point is how it circulates. If €200M goes into a transfer fee, it is locked into a prestige loop instead of funding productive investment, it gets trapped in a cycle that reinforces inequality and produces very little outside of image-building. The recipients of this money are a tiny elite which they then spend mostly in elite consumption loops: luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens.
Speaking capitalist language, overinflated football spending is a misallocation of capital on low-return assets which creates market distortions.
>luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens
All of that eventually has to flow back into, as you'd put it, non-elite segments of the economy. What, do you think shipyard workers eat yatchs? There's no subnetwork in the economy where money flows in and never comes back out. That just doesn't exist.
Sounds like a good deal for Europeans and a terrible for Qataris.
Europeans get the oil, Qataris get to brand football stars and make decisions at some clubs.
And I thought things were bad in my country where all "sports" shows are about football and you can have 3 different FM stations broadcasting the same game and they'll discuss football even when there is nothing going on.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
I obviously don't agree with spain doing this, but I also have trouble feeling sorry for cloudflare, since they're also in the business of randomly blocking certain IPs from accessing half the internet
Cloudflare created a problem where everything is centralized.
It's also, not that great. Even the most crude WordPress vulnerability scan requests aren't flagged or blocked. It seems most DDoS attacks may come through as well.
On one hand, this is a clear overreach of the courts: They gave a private party the right to censor random sources without judicial oversight.
On the other hand, the courts still need to judicate in their respective countries. If cloudflare says: We're in another country so the courts cant make us block illegal things, well, the courts have to overblock or they lose the ability to enforce their decisions.
Some decisions do not need to be possible. No amount of court judgements will make pigs fly. Perhaps it is about time we took the decisions of what may or may not be on the internet outside the reach of idiots.
We. You, me, readers here, are the people who are in charge of design decisions for future systems and networks. When designing them, favor reliability, resilience, decentralization! Make it impossible to take things down! Let them pass useless judgements and make toothless rules. Design so that those judgements and rules apply no more to the internet of tomorrow than they do to the sun, moon, and stars.
In the reddit there's a link to another article related and there's response from Laliga (If I got it right):
> Desde LaLiga también advierten que "aquellos clientes de Cloudflare que puedan sufrir bloqueos en sus webs, pueden dirigirse al email afectadoscloudflare@laliga.es con el fin de hacer llegar a Cloudflare que el contenido ilegal alojado en la IP de su misma web no tiene su autorización".
So they eventually made an email to report if you're being affected by their blocking.
What they do if receive such an email, it is to bully and threaten the owner of the webpage saying that their web is hosted in the same IP than pirates streaming and they would take legal action.
I find it interesting that cloudflare is okay with those piracy sites getting its shared IPs blocked, while a couple of years ago they forced a casino to shell out for the enterprise plan and dedicated IPs to contain the fallout of banned IPs.
They are not okay with it, they first in march tried to get it annulled that was rejected by the courts [1]. Now they are appealing in the constitutional court [2]. Spanish sources:
Lots of these sorts of European problems could be fixed if Cloudflare+Google+Apple+Microsoft colluded to block an entire country from all their services at once until it is resolved. And then move on to the next country, and the next.
It's not random. Many pirate sites use Cloudflare and Cloudflare does not do a good enough job of taking them down which enables pirating of the sport broadcast.
Routing your game traffic through a CDN is not normal anyways.
Related (7 years ago):
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses...
- Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
- The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions.
- La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect if the sound matches with that of a football match. In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located. That way they can locate bars and other establishments where football is being pirated or showed without paying for the bar package.
Still amazes me this just sort of went by and no one really seemed bothered. Absolutely insane.
> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month.
This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid.
Applies to all venues and events. Bars, restaurants, grocery shops, barbers, sports events, concerts, taxis, lounges, everything with an audience.
I don't want to say it's the same everywhere in the EU, but I have always assumed it's a common concept in most western countries at least.
In most EU countries private copying levies are paid to the copyright mafia any time you purchase a hard drive, printer or even a blank cassette. Because you know, you might copy something using it.
Also, blank media levies in no way give you permission to do what you're paying a tax the biggest rights owners for.
yeah but I paid the full levy so I will download all the things that aren't illegal and hunting and gathering for free films isn't illegal
Corruption
On its own, nothing seems out of the ordinary. It's the extremes that La Liga takes to ensure they're getting that 200€/m that makes it insane.
It's not the same everywhere in the EU, but here in Poland as an establishment owner you have to pay this fee to an agency that purports to represent the musicians. As you describe eg. Spotify in background.
This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.
The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.
AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.
Idk it's a shitty concept imho.
This is common in many countries around the world.
I’m sure the prices have gone up since that comment, but 200€/month actually seems very reasonable for a commercial bar that shows sporting events. That’s let’s than 7€/day and would be more than covered by the first group of people walking in the door and buying a round of drinks.
I don’t approve of the microphone activation spying stuff or the ridiculous internet blocking. However it’s also kind of bizarre that it reached this point when the monthly fees for bar owners were such a trivial amount.
Do bars in the US just show matches on a residential cable tv connection?
Small bars, yes. There are limits to the square footage, and the number and size of TVs - above which you need to purchase a commercial license.
Yup
What about this music from these free pages which are flooding the internet? There is plenty of royality free music? (e.g. used by youtubers?)
is it different from turning on radio?
Private corporations acting like police, engaging in illegal wiretapping and eavesdropping at massive scales to detect and punish crimes as defined by themselves.
We truly are living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
It's clearly not illegal.
That's what makes it a dystopia
Often it’s not. Back when Sony put a Windows rootkit on autorun on music CDs just in case someone wanted to rip a FLAC, that was a felony violation of the CFAA in the US. The big difference is consent. If I use your app to watch a game and the conditions of using your app include giving you microphone access, that’s legal. If you breach my phone to turn on the mic and listen to me, that’s illegal.
So if someone for example, adds a statement to T&C that as a payment for use of software, the user consents to collecting of a sequence of pressed keys (including 16-digit numbers) and selling them on the black market to whoever is interested, it becomes legal?
Wait, does that also mean bars have to police what people are watching on their phone, otherwise risking big fines?
E.g. I go to the pub, have a drink and watch some random LaLiga match on my phone?
No, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers.
In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/668952/why-pub-TV...
La Liga are presumably muxing infrasonic audio into their residential streams to try and:
(a) watermark the residential account(s) used to provide the streaming services so they can prosecute the providers
(b) Detect commercial usage of residential accounts used in piracy to prosecute the venues, by listening out via the App.
They could presumably get around GDPR by virtue of the fact they're only listening and recording audio out of human audible range, and only for identification of copyright infringement as per the TOS of the La Liga App.
I don't believe that's what OP is asking, they mean to ask about the following scenario:
1. Someone sitting next to you in a bar is playing a match on their phone, but the bar is not.
2. Your phone has the app installed and hears the match.
3. La Liga sues the bar?
Presumably then La Liga investigates the bar in-person. Or waits until X reports have occurred over Y duration and THEN have someone investigate in-person.
You are giving them a lot more credit than their behavior deserves.
I doubt it. They’re not going to take a case to court for a single hit because it would be so easily dismissed.
They would have higher priority situations where dozens of phones hit at the same time in the same bar.
>In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract.
That seems as if it would be so easy to fake...
The pint glass also changes colour
Does it cost more less time/effort for the bar to fake it though? The price of 200€/month above seems low enough to just pay it.
I think that's it.
I assume the pint glass pops up at intervals that the investigators would know and the general public would not, so you'd need some kind of central service with someone watching the commercial stream and showing/hiding the pint glass at the right intervals. In which case it would make more sense to operate a central service just pirating the commercial stream, which I'm sure does happen and does get shut down.
There has to be a EU privacy violation in there somewhere right? Or does that not count for giant EU companies?
They'll just say they have a "legitimate" interest in the data.
GDPR is enforced by country itself and this racket is supported by government, so... You would need to sue whole country.
It’s not personal data.
Legally, you mean? Because I'd say most reasonable people would say a literal wire on your phone is pretty personal. Location is PID too if they store the data at all
GPS of your phone and the audio from your phone?
How is that not personal data?
It's not identifiable info maybe ?
It is.
The escape hatch with all personal data processing is "legitimate interest". Consent is a big part of it, but an industry with sufficiently deep legal pockets would likely go down the route of "legitimate interest" if cornered.
I'm not a legal professional. I just work next to this stuff.
That's not what legitimate interest is supposed to mean though.
Legitimate interest is about collection of data necessary to operate your service.
Listening to detect if someone in a user's surrounding is showing a match without license has nothing to do with the function of the application. There's no legitimate interest there.
I think a lot would depend on whether they do any kind of on-device processing to determine whether the audio is likely to be a football match or not. I think they could successfully argue that data processed on your phone and not shared with them is processed by you, and then they could argue that the data that is shared falls under legitimate interests and would be proportionate, and pass a balancing test.
IANALEither
Are we sure ? I'm not disputing it, but is geo location alone as a data point covered GDPR ?
I'll have to look that up, but as someone else said it's only enforced at EU member state level, however there is another central oversight to ensure it's enforced.
Not if you have no possible way to identify the person to whom it is related (this includes server logs etc). Theoretically, an event sent to a server with some GPS co-ordinates, with no metadata and no logs stored on the server at all could perhaps be found not to be personally identifiable.
This is almost certainly a thought experiment though, the amount of engineering effort required to ensure no logs of any kind could result in deriving the IP address of the user would be high, and they’re probably not doing it (even if they are actually not sending any identifying information directly).
You might also find that you have to take special care to avoid creating circumstances that allow inference of personal information. For example, sampling every night at 11pm, you’re very likely to be able to determine an address or approximate location of the subscribers home.
Yes. Personal data under GDPR is "any information which are related to an identified or identifiable natural person". If it's data about a specific person, it's personal data, it's a very straightforward definition. Businesses need either informed consent or legitimate interest to store or process it.
of course you can tip your favourite bar to the football police https://laligabares.com/denuncias/
> In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located.
How much do GPS/Galileo/GNSS jammers go for nowadays?
In days of prison time?
I would never agree to this. But it doesn't strike me as particularly unethical, either. So long as both parties understand what they're agreeing to, this seems perfectly fine.
If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.
I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since one on of the main selling points for streaming is to not have to pay for a bundle of things you mostly don't want to be able to get the few things you do), but it assumes that people will never be traveling and unable to watch the games locally even if they do normally have access to it. My dad frequently travels for work, and he pays for the streaming service mostly to be able to watch Phillies games despite living in the Boston area, but the blackout rules mean that he can't even watch the Red Sox games with the streaming service if he's traveling outside of Boston. He also can't watch the Phillies games when they play the Red Sox in Boston, which is mostly fine, but it's still a little weird since he'll be have to watch the Red Sox broadcast (and therefore their commentators) rather than the Phillies one he's used to seeing for their games. The games that are given special slots on ESPN also tend to be blacked out for everyone, so that also causes issues for people wanting to stream them even if it's not a local game. The whole model seems to be more about trying to railroad people in paying for a less convenient, more expensive product even when they actively want to pay for something that's actually available but artificially limited. I don't get why anyone would be surprised that people just turn to "piracy" when things work like this.
Why doesn't he just save himself the time, money and hassle and just watch the highlights or highlight clips.
I understand why the NFL is going the stream route given how popular it is already. They can afford to inconvenience people. But MLB has been stagnant or declining for so long. You'd think they'd make their content more accessible to grow the fan base.
I think he enjoys having the entire game on in the background. He's partially switched over to listening to the radio broadcasts for games, which apparently are often provided online as well (which makes sense, given nothing really needs to change in terms of how they make money to provide it online instead of via a radio station).
What's weird to me is that the MLB does seem to genuinely be trying to make changes in terms of gameplay to try to keep relevant (especially around reviews for on-field calls, but also in terms of some of the changes in recent years that were controversial but seem to have produced meaningful results in reversing some of the creep in how long it takes for games to finish), and my understanding is that they basically were the first major sports league in the US to invest in streaming technology, to the point where I remember reading that the NHL app (and maybe some of the others) were originally developed and maintained by MLB's programmers as well. I'm not sure how they've managed to fall so far behind in terms of streaming experience; the most apparent difference is that the baseball season is over ten times as many games, which presumably could have some sort of effect on things, but my naive expectation would be that it would incentive having a stable infrastructure for this even more. Maybe it's just a matter of them being able to get away with blocking some games because there are still so many others that don't get blocked during the rest of the season? With only 16 games in a regular season, blocking even one of them might just be something viewers are less willing to put up with.
> I'm not sure how they've managed to fall so far behind in terms of streaming experience
It's because they need to keep the broadcasters and the teams happy and broadcasters want to have exclusive content. In some markets, teams want local blackouts to help get butts in seats.
And this is how free markets result in dystopia.
The whole copyright institution seems pretty unethical to me. It's wild that someone can own the royalties to a particular piece of content for 70+ years after the original creator dies (at least that's the law in the US, I assume similar elsewhere), and that the creator can unilaterally name his price for licenses to that content (you can't even know if you want the content without first paying for a license to consume it) and then if you want to put the content into a different format (for example, if you own an HD Blu-Ray and want to put it on a hard drive) you effectively have to pay for a _new license_ for the same content. This is just scratching the surface of the ethical bankruptcy associated with intellectual property.
In Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy). To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of twenty years ago). The major effect of this is that newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents. These people are trying to milk a cow that will be dry in less than 5 years, unless a major revolution happens in FIGC (Italian Football Federation).
> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly
Same in Germany.
> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football
Also the same in Germany.
But I am not sure which direction the causality goes. Maybe people are less interested in football because of the shenanigans they are constantly pulling. Or maybe they try to squeeze the remaining audience because people are less interested. It may also not be related at all.
Most leagues face the same issue: just one to three wealthy clubs dominate, winning around 70–80% of the time, which makes the competition less exciting. The German Bundesliga is one of the starkest examples: Bayern Munich has taken 16 of the last 20 titles.
haha, andy why is that?
Because of ridiculous transfer rules & markets - if these would be killed, there would be much more competition, and it was that way, 20-30+ years ago....
You can see this in most everything: 5 companies dominate IT, 3 companies dominate sodas, 3 companies dominate credit cards, etc. I think it is a byproduct of the way our current system works.
What pisses me off over here, is that for some strange reason, well not strange rather the whole thing that is being discussed, we hardly get any matches on the radio, whereas in the south this is a given, even in Spain.
It is always some streaming service like Magenta Sport, and that's it.
> Same in Germany.
That's not right. Still expensive, but the dual abo for Sky Bundesliga + DAZN is 65€ per month.[1]
1 https://www.sky.de/pakete-produkte/sky-dazn
65€ for watching _only_ football/soccer, Jesus :-D
Still doesn't give you the full Champions League.
I get where the leagues came from, but the result for the customers has been worse.
I think it’s most likely that football is honestly a bit shit, and there are many better things to do for entertainment that don’t require mortgaging a kidney to watch.
try going to germany, where you can get a season ticket at top club for a few hundred euros.
i think Bayern Munich's cheapest season ticket is like $200 at the current exchange rate. that's manageable. i've paid more than that for a single NFL game in OK-ish seats.
You won't get a season ticket for most clubs in your lifetime, the queues are enormous, so the price point really doesn't matter.
>>Also the same in Germany.
Just because you want something to be true to make your argument...doesn't make it true.
Growth for memberships over the last few years are pretty strong especially in the under 16 age group with 9% yoy.[1]
Attendance is also on a steady upwards trend.[2]
The last EM also had new highs in viewership linear and streaming. As overall the non-linear media surrounding football is growing...[3]
[1] https://www.dfb.de/news/dfb-mitgliederstatistik-mehr-schiris...
[2] https://twocircles.com/gb/articles/2024-sports-attendance-ge...
[3] https://www.agf.de/en/services/press/press-release/tv-bilanz...
> Attendance is also on a steady upwards trend
> Professional sports in Germany attracted more fans than ever before in 2024; a trend not limited to just football.
Come on dude it's on the same page just below the initial summary which seems to be the only thing you bothered to read. It's even big bullet pointy for the attention starved...
>> German men’s football remains the most attended sport in the country by far. It is also a key driver of the overall attendance figures, with the top three professional leagues alone accounting for 46% of the growth since 2017/18.
I'm bias.
Born and raised in England, the nation of football, and I loathe football. The hooligan shenanigans we cause in other countries pisses me off. There is no respect.
I got pushed on the subway the other day because of some local match. Some drunken twat thought I was someone who supported the rival opposition and nearly dragged me off the opposite escalator. I can't wait for football to die, I partake in sports too, I sword fence.
While I can't vouch if it's the same for other countries where football isn't their thing. Generalizing for example Canada and Ice Hockey. But when I was in Canada coincidentally when national matches the vibe was holy different to that of Brits and football.
Totally fine. Still no need to spread FUD/misinformation.
Misrepresentation, yes. Neither FUD nor Misinformation when it's quoted out of the article
Next time just don't misrepresent stuff so I don't misrepresent you misrepresenting stuff. :)
What pisses me off is that they've said (in Germany) that they are trying to avoid monopolies and the rights need to go to multiple rights owners. Instead of giving the same rights to multiple broadcasters as would be normal for real non-monopolies, they split up the rights and gave each part to a single broadcaster. Which means, the full broadcasting rights are held by multiple parties, e.g. it's not a monopoly, but each broadcaster has a monopoly over his part of the cake. Which means if you want to have the whole cake as a fan, you need to pay the cartel, i.e. all broadcasters at once.
In Ireland it's closer to €200/month just for Soccer depending on who you support. As a result 1 in 5 homes in Ireland admit to having a 'dodgy box' - i.e. an android or SoC box capable of running an IPTV Subscription pirating live Digital TV and various streaming services. These are usually sold as an annual subscription for €50-100 in pubs and on places like facebook marketplace.
The Irish Legal Community has already raised issues with how Sky is going about tracking down infringement at the user level, as they have an appalling record in this area and are likely to try and emulate the egregious situation in Spain to mitigate or retaliate.
https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2025/june/dodg... https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0619/1519317-data-prote...
What's even more ridiculous is the "3pm blackout" rule which prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00. The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force even in the globalised streaming era. Sadly the rights-holders can't be bothered splitting the package for Ireland, so we get to pay more for SkySports and still have to buy additional services.
In short, piracy is always a service issue. As a soccer fan going legit you'd possibly need to maintain a Sky Sports, BT Sport, TNT Sports and Premier Sports subscription. God forbid you want screen-casting support or 4K resolution.
In Ireland you STILL can't purchase/watch UFC PPVs as one-offs, there isn't a way for you to watch it legally the next day or live as a single event. The only way would be to get a subscription to a big provider like SkyTV or NOW!
Best way to watch sports now is to go to a bar that broadcasts it. If you have a drink, it only costs you 5EUR/match. Maybe you watch 5-6 matches a month, so still cheaper than 100EUR/month and you get drinks and service included.
Also can shout without neighbours calling police.
On the other hand, Serie A started streaming all matches free on YouTube for SEA countries.
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1nf7ghg/serie_a_ann...
They pulled the plug on the project almost right away. Apparently, it had something to do with YouTube not being able to limit the live stream to Southeast Asian countries without it leaking to the rest of the world—where you’d need a pricey subscription to watch the game.
Oh, I didn't know that they pulled the plug.
So only a VPN is needed?
the theory was that YT has pretty good VPN detection. But they stopped doing it immediately, so probably that didn't work out.
> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly
It's the same for anime, and guess what, I just pirate and pay no one.
Anime has long had a model where shows are ‘free’ (historically, on broadcast TV) and the money comes from sales of disks, manga, and other merchandise. (On the other hand, Japan has copyright laws that make the US look laid back.)
Yes, but the problem is that you want to watch football live, and LaLiga is harming lots of unrelated businesses with this approach.
Yeah, it's hilarious that, on the same planet, we have articles like "Nine things I learned in ninety years" come out, while the courts of an EU country give "LaLiga," which appears to be a private corporation (a football company), the authority to ban any IPs they want arbitrarily, for everyone, country-wide. People just don't care any more, if ever did.
Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?
Cloudflare are https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...
What complicates it is that the ISP, Telefonica, is also a Soccer rights-holder.
How they haven't sued La Liga for defamation is beyond me though; publicly condemning Cloudflare's role in enabling piracy by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit.
https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...
Traditionally all soccer organisations from FIFA down are absolutely rife with corruption and other criminal activity. Best to view current events through that lense. For example, Fifa in 2015 were done for bribery, fraud and money laundering to corrupt the issuing of media and marketing rights for FIFA games in the Americas, estimated at $150 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_FIFA_corruption_case
Exactly: Telefonica is not only the rights holder, it is an ISP… Which seems a conflict of interests but you know, Spain is different!
If you're a Cloudflare customer who suffers damages when LaLiga obtains a DNS block for Cloudflare IPs used for pirate streams, you'll have better chances suing Cloudflare for failing to provide the service you're paying them for (of course if you're on a free plan, you don't have much of a leg to stand on).
One Cloudflare customer doing something illegal is only able to cause this much collateral damage because Cloudflare is set up so that taking down one customer requires taking down most of their infrastructure. But what works for DDoS protection doesn't work so well for legally mandated blocks. I think at some point Cloudflare will have to start kicking pirate streams off their platform faster if they want to stay up.
I'm not an ardent defender of Cloudflare by any means, but there is no grounds to sue Cloudflare. Their service is up. Their IP ranges are getting blocked by residential ISPs. How would that be Cloudflare's fault?
>How would that be Cloudflare's fault?
Because the reason they are getting blocked is because of the actions Cloudflare is taking. If cloudflare would stop streaming these pirate broadcasts, the blocking would stop. These blocks are not just random.
To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price. Though some significant shows often end up locked on random services unfortunately.
> To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price
Depending on if crunchyroll is available in your region :) . And they have some truly awful subtitles for some shows.
those pirated anime (esp. speed subs) mostly also just steal the crunchyroll subtitles as well, so if it was awful there, it will be also awful in the pirated version!
To get subs in my language I do have to go to go-anime. Which is btw pretty bad (sometimes you have to reload 30 times before something starts, summaries are wrong, no chromecasting, etc.)
> newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents.
These are good news, tbh.
Currently having this fight with hockey in the US. If I want to watch all of my team's games it's $65/mo split across 3 separate services
NFL and NASCAR are similar.
100 euros monthly is going to be very high anywhere, this is completely insane.
The main reason I don't watch any one it is because it's all locked away under expensive subscriptions and I don't really live in a place with great football matches, so yeah...I'd actually be into it if it was accessible, I just couldn't be bothered figuring out how to watch it, nor can I afford 100 euroes a month.
So it looks like a self resolving problem? As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear, and hopefully kids will be encouraged to do more creative activities than kicking a ball.
I agree with all you said except the last part.
Sport is good and team sport is better. A "lifestyle guru" should know that. Kicking a ball is maybe the lowest entry barrier sport in many countries. I'm from latin america and here you grow playing fútbol. Find a ball, gather your friends and you're ready to go.
Given your username I wouldn't expect such harsh sentiment about people who enjoy playing football. I would prefer my kids play a sport they enjoy than sit on an iPad all day. But I'm not a lifestyle guru.
European football is more about gambling, betting, and drug trafficking than about sport.
Utter nonsense.
It's about sport and community. Yeah, the Bulgarian football scene is dominated by the mafia and gambling, but that's the exception, not the norm.
Kicking a ball is fun though. However I am not interested in watching pros kicking a ball.
> As a bonus football hooligans and football vandalism will disappear,
You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions? They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme. If you've hanged out with people who are proud to be hooligans and ultras today, you'd see how removing football wouldn't get them to stop.
> You think these people would suddenly stop needing an outlet for their emotions?
It is not an outlet for emotions that would need to be expressed similarly. It on itself creates emotions and social structures that make those expressions violent.
> They'll find a different way of doing the same thing, around a different theme.
Some of them will, some of them wont. They wont be in such a large pack in the same place at the same time. There will be less peer pressure to participate in these groups on young men and less validation.
They will have much harder time to organize too.
On the other hand kids (and adults) not getting enough exercise is a modern health crisis. More kids kicking a ball would be significant improvement over current status quo of kids staring at brainrot.
agree. im american and i see a bunch of youth in major cities who are clearly unhealthy.
sport should be encouraged. i get that not everyone likes it, and not everyone will enjoy it (and even fewer will be good enough to actually enjoy it), but encouraging physical activity instead of playing on phones is a good thing.
i was a nerd growing up (still am) and i sucked at sports (still do). i still enjoyed doing them and knew that physical activity was beneficial.
Hooligans won't go away with football, they'll just find another outlet for their suppressed beta male rage and weak minded tribalism.
you don't think kids should play sports? that seems like an unusual view and am kind of curious why you would think that.
Kick a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, jump over the ball, stick a ball somewhere. A ball, a stick, a ring, a board. I hate that football is the default sport and was forced myself to play it in my childhood.
Look, I disliked football for the reason that it made me an outcast. All males in my class in elementary school played football on a regular basis. I did not. It made me associate more with another guy (only 1, yeah) and girls. It made me just pick up a book and read while others were playing sports (happened to be football).
... but I did make myself an outcast as I was growing up as I would rather use my PC (for programming) than go outside.
> I hate that football is the default sport
It is the default sport because the barrier to entry is basically having a ball. Random rocks, backpacks, whatever you have can serve as the goalposts.
Most other sports require other equipment too (volleyball needs the net, basketball the hoop, etc. etc.).
It's also easy to understand, and being the most popular sport by far in most countries, allows for an easy appropriation to a community and sense of belonging.
> was forced myself to play it in my childhood
So you're just trauma dumping your childhood issues?
also football can be played in basically any number, from 1:1 to 11:11, which means you can go out with a ball, meet one other kid and play, and random other kids can just join in.
I've literally seen kids unable to speak with each other because of different languages able to join a match :)
I was terrible at football as a kid so it's not like it did much for me, but one cannot deny how universal the game is.
That's true. It's not unique to football (same can be applied to basketball and volleyball and etc.) but it's one more advantage.
Some of us are tracking their blocking over at:
https://hayahora.futbol https://tinyuptime.sconde.net
It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!).
Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.
Man, and I was already annoyed that my tax money went to extra police to prevent idiots from fighting and wrecking stuff around matches.
I for one think that football streaming should be blocked when I'm pulling docker images ;)
The amount of resources that goes into soccer in many countries is really astonishing. It can be seen as a modern equivalent to bread and circuses however.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
You should probably check Github as well. We have consistent problems connecting to github during football matches
Will be very similar to this type of abuse report someone got on their Hetzner server (even though it had no piracy activity);
> On 27 Nov 23:27, operations@friendmts.com wrote: To whom it may concern:
Our reference: PRB-XXXXXX Security Code: 2x364371x-x45x-59x2-8760-32x46276790
Access to the IP address detailed below has been blocked in the United Kingdom by court order.
The block will apply to: IP Address: 95.217.118.31 For all Premier League Match Periods Until: 07 Dec 2020
Further notifications will not be sent about this IP address unless and until further infringements are detected after the date and time indicated above, though the IP address will remain subject to blocking until then. If your organisation is planning to reallocate this IP address to another customer before the date listed above, please notify us at ipallocation@friendmts.com with the appropriate information so that we can consider releasing the IP from subsequent blocking.
A copy of the court order, which was obtained by the Football Association Premier League Limited is available here: https://www.fmtsoperations.com/HC-2017-002013-ORDER.PDF
Any affected server operator or hosting provider has the right to apply to the Court to discharge or vary the Order.
Yes, we know. Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?
Internet mostly works in Spain when there is a match: one can see traffic figures from the mayor exchange points: they are unaffected.
Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry.
Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks.
Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
> Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches.
There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches.
Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants.
That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
I think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because:
1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.
2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.
3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
> the very same Spanish state must keep working
“Vuelva usted mañana.”
Apparently it's not being communicated properly, or you don't actually read what you come across, because "Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches" isn't true at all.
Large parts are blocked, yes, as collateral damage. But it doesn't seem like they're completely switching it off, as obviously then there would be huge protests, mostly because people wouldn't be able to legally watch the games then!
I might be naive, but this is absolutely outrageous. What laws allow a private company dictate what IPs can be banned across an entire country? Are the ISPs voluntarily cooperating or are they now all obliged to follow LaLiga requests?
ISP with the right to football goes to court to report themselves (not a joke) about piracy happening in their networks.
An old man judge which understand technology as much as I understand biochemistry (nothing) decides that they need to stop piracy, His solution is to give laliga the power to block those illegal streams, that all ISP must comply for the time that a match exist. The judge covers himself by saying, that the blockage can't affect third parties.
All ISP happy comply. It does affect third parties.
Cloudflare (third party) puts a recourse to say that it is affecting their business. The very same old man, decides, that is not going to proceed with that investigation.
So cloudflare needs to to through a different slower legal procedure.
Meanwhile, we have a company with the authority to block what they want thanks to corruption.
Thanks for the summary. I assume this will go up the chain of appeals etc. and on to the EU courts if needed?
Tribunals. But notice that a possible outcome here is that _Cloudflare_ gets mandated by the same tribunals to perform the blocking of sport streaming sites.
This is what's happening in Italy, for example.
Football is wild. Imagine countries and governments collect taxes.
Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar.
Then Qatar spends €262 millions on a single football player and gazillions on a European club, which is at €889 million loss over the last five years
In the end, who is paying for it all? Ordinary people ultimately foot the bill – whether through higher energy prices, taxes, or the opportunity cost of that money leaving the productive economy – while the football circus rolls on.
> Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar.
This isn't how the energy market works.
Fair point, governments don't literally wire tax money straight to Qatar for oil.
But whether it is at the pump or through subsidies, it is still ordinary people who end up carrying the cost — and that money gets recycled into football vanity projects.
I mean, if you're going to consider indirect transactions too, eventually every part of the economy ends up affecting every other part. That money that goes into those projects doesn't just vanish, it gets spent and flows back out into the economy.
From a wider perspective it does vanish in terms of productive value: billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle, instead of going into things that improve lives (cheap energy, infrastructure, innovation, public goods)
I honestly don't understand what you mean.
>billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle
"Club losses"? If you pay a football player 100k to play a match, even if the point of the match is nothing but spectacle, that money doesn't evaporate. The player will spend it on the economy. What else could he possibly do with it besides spending it or tossing it in a fire? If a club spends 10M on something entirely frivolous -- say, a giant concrete football -- that money also doesn't simply disappear, it's used to pay the people who will make the raw materials and the people who will design and build the thing. Only individuals and distinct entities lose money. An economy never does.
The point is how it circulates. If €200M goes into a transfer fee, it is locked into a prestige loop instead of funding productive investment, it gets trapped in a cycle that reinforces inequality and produces very little outside of image-building. The recipients of this money are a tiny elite which they then spend mostly in elite consumption loops: luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens.
Speaking capitalist language, overinflated football spending is a misallocation of capital on low-return assets which creates market distortions.
>luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens
All of that eventually has to flow back into, as you'd put it, non-elite segments of the economy. What, do you think shipyard workers eat yatchs? There's no subnetwork in the economy where money flows in and never comes back out. That just doesn't exist.
I think you know what they mean...fuel is subsidized by the government, and Qatar winds up with the subsidized money. Need it be more complicated?
Sounds like a good deal for Europeans and a terrible for Qataris. Europeans get the oil, Qataris get to brand football stars and make decisions at some clubs.
And I thought things were bad in my country where all "sports" shows are about football and you can have 3 different FM stations broadcasting the same game and they'll discuss football even when there is nothing going on.
It's a monothematic sporting desert.
I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
I obviously don't agree with spain doing this, but I also have trouble feeling sorry for cloudflare, since they're also in the business of randomly blocking certain IPs from accessing half the internet
Cloudflare created a problem where everything is centralized.
It's also, not that great. Even the most crude WordPress vulnerability scan requests aren't flagged or blocked. It seems most DDoS attacks may come through as well.
Don't get me even started on the checkbox.
It's a US data-hoarder.
I see 2 nasties here:
On one hand, this is a clear overreach of the courts: They gave a private party the right to censor random sources without judicial oversight.
On the other hand, the courts still need to judicate in their respective countries. If cloudflare says: We're in another country so the courts cant make us block illegal things, well, the courts have to overblock or they lose the ability to enforce their decisions.
Some decisions do not need to be possible. No amount of court judgements will make pigs fly. Perhaps it is about time we took the decisions of what may or may not be on the internet outside the reach of idiots.
We. You, me, readers here, are the people who are in charge of design decisions for future systems and networks. When designing them, favor reliability, resilience, decentralization! Make it impossible to take things down! Let them pass useless judgements and make toothless rules. Design so that those judgements and rules apply no more to the internet of tomorrow than they do to the sun, moon, and stars.
That is wild. Which other country gives a private body the power to ban any IP address for the entire country?
Italy.
I mean, the power was given by the court, so you could argue that the ISPs are just following court orders.
On the other hand, there's SpaceX which has the power to block an entire country from accessing the internet.
You could only say that if the IP address list was given by the court to the ISPs.
Larger discussion here:
"LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
In the reddit there's a link to another article related and there's response from Laliga (If I got it right):
> Desde LaLiga también advierten que "aquellos clientes de Cloudflare que puedan sufrir bloqueos en sus webs, pueden dirigirse al email afectadoscloudflare@laliga.es con el fin de hacer llegar a Cloudflare que el contenido ilegal alojado en la IP de su misma web no tiene su autorización".
So they eventually made an email to report if you're being affected by their blocking.
What they do if receive such an email, it is to bully and threaten the owner of the webpage saying that their web is hosted in the same IP than pirates streaming and they would take legal action.
Just, so that you know what is really going on.
But the intent of that email is not to unblock the IP, but to put pressure on Cloudfare to stop giving service to the allegedly pirate sites.
My server is also unreachable: my website, my projects (which people use)... Because it's on some IP that Vercel uses.
I find it interesting that cloudflare is okay with those piracy sites getting its shared IPs blocked, while a couple of years ago they forced a casino to shell out for the enterprise plan and dedicated IPs to contain the fallout of banned IPs.
I would assume they'd just decline and shut operations for that particular domain and create a new domain/account on cloudflare for the new site?
Not sure how attached these sites are to their specific brand/domain (or if this is indirect where main sites link to other sites that host the video)
They are not okay with it, they first in march tried to get it annulled that was rejected by the courts [1]. Now they are appealing in the constitutional court [2]. Spanish sources:
[1] https://www.genbeta.com/actualidad/gol-laliga-a-cloudflare-j...
[2] https://www.xataka.com/legislacion-y-derechos/bloqueos-ip-la...
Cloudflare also said they are prepared to go all the way to EU courts if necessary.
I’m surprised it’s still going on. There are things a southern Europe government shouldn’t mess with, gas prices and football are part of them.
Spanish are surprisingly quiet about that or they bought vpn en masse.
If only Tebas put this much energy into improving LaLiga's awful and outright shady refereeing and the rampant racism problem.
My external home assistant doesnt work either, I have to use the VPN.
Thanks Tebas.
This is the most Spanish thing of all time.
Mandatory siesta.
Obvious corruption. Shameful
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
Lots of these sorts of European problems could be fixed if Cloudflare+Google+Apple+Microsoft colluded to block an entire country from all their services at once until it is resolved. And then move on to the next country, and the next.
As a Brazilian I say: the world would be a much better place without football.
It seems that being a crook is a requirement to be on the management of any national football league, from Brazilian CBF to FIFA and La Liga.
anything that encourages the youth to get outside and play makes the world a better place almost by default.
god forbid they exercise, they should be indoors studying or playing on their phones 100% of the time. </s>
maybe the world would be a better place without football hooligans, sure. but without a sport that billions love and play? no.
Ipv6 is not blocked. O2 gives me ipv6.
Love the sport, hate the business.
[dupe]
LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
>they randomly ban cloudflare IP ranges.
It's not random. Many pirate sites use Cloudflare and Cloudflare does not do a good enough job of taking them down which enables pirating of the sport broadcast.
Routing your game traffic through a CDN is not normal anyways.
I think companies need to start suing for damages when their business applications get blocked.
Only boomers watch football (or any sports for that matter, or television for that matter). The problem will solve itself in time.
I live in Spain, that's absolutely not true, football is as popular as ever.
Wow, that explains a lot :(
Even for the internet, this is stupid.
Unlikely, younger generation doesn't care.
Mobile users should remove old from the url [0]. The old Reddit website does not load properly on my mobile device.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1np6kyn/my_games_s...
Edit: commenters below made me realize that my extension StopTheMadness messed up old Reddit. Sorry
Old Reddit loads perfectly fine for me on iOS.
What OS are you on and what is the specific problem you see when you try to load this Old Reddit link from OP?
Your comment made me realize that it was an extension I’m using on my iPhone on iOS 26 that is causing the issue. The extension is StopTheMadness.
I had an option called “Protect page zoom controls” which allows you to zoom on sites that disable zoom, but it breaks this website.
while at it consider 'sinkit for old reddit'. makes it palatable, certainly superior to the shreddit app
Works fine for me (Firefox on Android)
For me it's much the opposite, I even use an extension on iOS Safari to redirect "www.reddit.com" to "old.reddit.com".
Stop trying to make new reddit happen, illusive Steve Huffman! /s
Seriously though, seconded that old works great still on ios 26.