2025 will be the year of controversy with the fight against piracy of football in Spain. The massive blocks of legal web pages are only the beginning, and now it is the turn of rapid pages and stream blocks without judicial authorization, thanks to a collaboration of LaLiga with CDN77 and Akamai Technologies.
The fight against piracy, and specifically against illicit broadcasts of football matches through IPTV, suffered a hard blow with the arrival of new technologies designed to protect user privacy. When browsers like Chrome adopted ECHTraditional blocks based on addresses (URL) lost a lot of effectiveness, because the operators could not see the pages that visited their users.
Hence, in the last year, LaLiga has focused on obtaining the methods for blocking by IP addresses, whose consequences we already know: blocking an IP involves blocking all the web services and pages that share it, even if they are legal and have nothing to do with football. Now, LaLiga has announced another step than can reduce the amount of innocent pages blockagesalthough not without your own doubts.
The agreement announced with CDN77 and Akamai Technologies allows LaLiga to order concrete IP addresses, skiping anonymization and safety measures They offer these companies. Both CDN77 and Akamai provide CDN services (content delivery network) that facilitate access to services offering protection against attacks such as ddos (denial of service) and an additional privacy layer. However, thanks to this agreement, now these companies will access the content ordered by LaLiga.
If the Spanish reader – the free Android sounds this scheme, it is for a good reason. It is a adaptation of the piracy shieldadopted in Italy as part of the new law against piracy that also includes fines for IPTV users; That extreme has not yet been achieved in Spain, but the collaboration announced by LaLiga is very similar, and it is no accident: Javier Thebas has already praised Piracy Shield in his day, and dropped that a similar system was possible in Spain.
Piracy Shield is a system that allows rights owners (for now, only football) ordering the blockage of services directly to Internet operators and services such as VPNS, which must respond within a period of only 30 minutes. The process is done No judicial authorization or verification If the service reported really is a pirate, and in fact, companies face large fines and even prison sorrows if they do not block in the established period.
However, Piracy Shield has had not a few problems since its implementation, many related to the way in which Legal services and conventional Internet users are affected. For example, Google Drive service was blocked last year, leaving millions of Italians without access to their archives; A measure that was later described as an “error”, but that highlighted the problem of not having any revision or authorization for blocking.
LaLiga seems to be aware of these problems, and although your system does not obtain direct judicial authorization for each blocked service, at least it states that its collaborators can Unlock “in an agile and effective way possible third -party websites that can be affected”. That is a surprising statement for LaLiga, which until now had taken importance to the blockages to affect innocent services.
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Instead of going to the government to create its own Piracy Shield, LaLiga has chosen to start private collaborations with affected companies, and these seem to be willing to do so, at least for the moment; In addition to CDN77 and Akamai, LaLiga presumes being In a dialogue phase with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to extend this system to its platform.
It is not surprising that one of the largest companies in the sector, Cloudflare, has not joined this system; Cloudflare and LaLiga are in the middle of a legal war and words, with the sports organization accusing the Internet company to collaborate with criminals to protect serious crimes apart from piracy.
