LaLiga seeks to eradicate piracy in football

Last update 4 November, 2020 by Alberto Llopis

The pirate websites have accompanied the world of football for many years. Nevertheless, For some time now, various countries have adopted measures to counteract this situation and block sites that offer content of skills whose rights belong to the different television networks.

In this regard, LaLiga has been one of the first to fight against piracy. Over time, has gone from controlling some 20 web pages almost 500. The situation is increasingly complex, since previously only Rojadirecta was used as a reference, website responsible for transmitting illegal content of practically all sports. Next to this site, in Spain they have been blocked 23 pirate websites with the effort undertaken by the legal department of LaLiga.

This area was created under the direction of President Javier Tebas and currently has 20 people working. Together with this team, other areas work such as Technological Content Protection, International Piracy and Communication, to name a few. In total, 30 people are working to eradicate this problem that affects Spanish football. His work focuses on different areas: social networks, monitoring, intelligence and analysis.

This work has been very prominent in the world of football, because no league in the world has these anti-piracy tools. During the last years LaLiga has developed three illegal content detection tools, which have given important results in this work: Marauder, Lumiere y Blackhole. These have become a world reference in the field of anti-piracy.

Due to the good results, the Jupiler Pro League, Belgian football championship, has been interested in this work, Therefore, it has contacted LaLiga to receive advice and carry out similar work with the use of the tools, in order to stop the spread of illegal content on the Internet.

On the other hand, A collaboration agreement was also signed between LaLiga and the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property of Peru (Indecopi). The workers of said institution have received advice from LaLiga to, via Lumiere tool, protect intellectual property rights in the digital section.

In accordance with Borja Gutierrez, director del portal Comparahosting, In countries like Peru, there is a huge consumption of piracy, which has taken advantage of the little legislation in the digital sector and the little control to expand.

“There are various methods of accessing pirated content: el peer-to-peer, cyberlocker and illegal IPTV streaming, to name the most notable. These are various ecosystems of online piracy of audiovisual content. The first refers to a computer network that works as a server for the rest, which facilitates file sharing without requiring a central server. The second refers to hosting services that use servers to distribute video. An example of this are Uptobox and Uploaded.net. The third is live TV content services, like Direct Red”, explains the expert.