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.

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.

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.

I think the outrage should be directed at an app secretly recording everything to look for "pirated content".

Do bars in the US just show matches on a residential cable tv connection?

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.

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?

It's clearly not illegal.

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.

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.

In days of prison time?

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.

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.