The lock of legal pages in Spain is only the beginning; LaLiga’s next step to try to protect your rights is the end of IPTV’s legal applications because they can be used to access pirate broadcasts. That is the intention of the complaint filed by the organization in Madrid, which has now been accepted to trial.
LaLiga has denounced the IPTV Extreme app developer For a crime against intellectual property, considering that it is only “apparently neutral” and that, in reality, it has been created to facilitate “the dissemination and consumption of piracy.” As the organization itself has highlighted, this is the first time that an oral trial is opened against the developer of one of these apps, and therefore, the sentence can completely change the Android apps panorama and the Internet in general.
IPTV Extreme is one of the many IPTV apps available on Google Play. As we explain in its day in Spanish – the free Android, IPTV technology is not illegal or pirate alone; It all depends on the content that is reproduced. In the same way that the HTTPS protocol is not illegal, although it can serve to reproduce pirate content in a web browser, so far IPTV apps have not been considered illegal, although with conditions.
Apparently, IPTV Extreme meets one of those conditions: on its Google Play page, the developer highlights that The application does not contain any channeland that the user is the one who must download the lists to be able to see the content you want. The developer, who in Google Play is registered as Paolo Turratti, asks users not to ask for lists, since he says he does not have, or share or sell lists. According to Google Play data, IPTV Extreme has been downloaded more than five million times, although it is also available through other channels such as APK.
IPTV lists are files that contain information from servers that are broadcasting content, such as television channels, movies, or matches. There are several Legal IPTV listswhich offer access only to content issued in open, public channels, or government retransmissions; In other words, content that is already offered for free, either thanks to advertising or financing of local and national governments.
Google Play Page of the IPTV Extreme App
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In the past, LaLiga has tried to end the Legal IPTV listswithout differentiating them from illegal servers lists that offer access to free payment matches. In 2023, LaLiga sent several DMCA requests to Google to remove the links to the IPTV-ORG page, the most popular legal list. This complaint, therefore, seems to be the next step of this strategy, pointing directly to apps that allow IPTV lists.
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The question is what are LaLiga’s arguments to consider that IPTV Extreme is an illegal app. In the announcement made today, the organization only accuses the app of working “apparently, as a simple player”, but states that in practice, “All infrastructure brings together to facilitate the dissemination and consumption of piracy”. Again, it is not clear if it refers to the fact that IPTV Extreme allows you to reproduce IPTV lists of any kind, or if you have discovered that this specific app facilitates access to illegal lists in some way.
If LaLiga considers that the mere fact of being an IPTV app is enough to “facilitate the consumption of piracy”, and if the judge is right, Things can change very quickly in Spain; It is very likely that the rest of apps disappear or erased from the Play Store, and can have greater consequences, such as if web browsers can also be considered responsible for showing pirate content introduced by the user.
