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| ▲ | michaelt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games. Pirates would rather not be blocked, so they create a new, disposable website for every game. Any blocking must happen fast. Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked. The courts would rather not create a special fast lane through the courts, just to resolve a squabble between two huge corporations. | | |
| ▲ | n6242 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games. Funny enough, I work in IT and I've had to use a VPN to be able to do my job when soccer is on, but my two non-tech-savy family members that do watch soccer using pirate livestreams say that they've never had any issues with blocked streams. | | |
| ▲ | KAMSPioneer 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I work in IT and have found that the issue impacts my work but not my ability to stream sports from sites of questionable legality. Of course, I don't pirate La Liga matches but that's primarily because I don't give a shit about soccer. But the point is that the measure does more to block legitimate use than illegitimate (in my experience). And next they want to go after VPNs. Wonderful. | | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But you must realize, the alternative to this is that some very wealthy Spanish companies ... lose a small amount of money. Surely you understand now. Go about your business, poor person. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | They don't even "lose a small amount of money." They simply gain less money than usual for a short period of time. Think of how rough that is for them. | | |
| ▲ | necovek 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's even that they "gain less money than they could if everyone watching illegally would pay for it when they could not watch illegally" (that's usually how companies crying "piracy" calculate "losses" — "let's assume everyone watching illegally would certainly still watch it and pay the full price"). | |
| ▲ | joquarky 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I once remember reading an article about shareholders selling off a stock because the rate of increase in profit had slowed. | | |
| ▲ | fireant a day ago | parent [-] | | There is nothing wrong with that. Stock price is based on perceived future value , not current company profits. |
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| ▲ | array_key_first 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Arguably they even gain more money in the long run, because more people have access to their entertainment and they have more opportunities to form life long connections with consumers. | |
| ▲ | shiroiuma a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | This isn't quite right either. It's "they gain less money than they might potentially gain if piracy weren't physically possible". If the piracy avenues didn't exist, how many people would actually pay full price to the legitimate sources, and how many people would simply go without? |
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| ▲ | hunterpayne 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In all fairness, the Spanish economy is a mine, a farm and a soccer league in a trenchcoat. Better than Ireland which is 2 tax shelters in a trenchcoat, but not by much. Not surprisingly, they are the 2 most left leaning countries in Europe. To be fair, they had an actual fascist government in Spain for several decades and there were atrocities committed. | | |
| ▲ | cool_dude85 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Ireland, the country with 2 center right parties that differ with regards to patronage networks and political history from 1940, is one of the most left-wing leaning countries in Europe? | | |
| ▲ | mghackerlady a day ago | parent [-] | | Eh, ireland is unique in that it has a centre-right coalition making it de facto one party. The main opposition, Sinn Fein, is about the same size as Fine Gael and Fianna Fail and might overtake Fine Gael at some point | | |
| ▲ | cool_dude85 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Right. So, no left wing party, not even a center left party, has been in power in Ireland in its history. But I'm supposed to believe that it's one of the most left wing countries in Europe? | | |
| ▲ | mghackerlady 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | in spirit it is, at least at its core. The irish revolution and civil war had strong socialist undertones |
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| ▲ | lentil_soup 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked. why would they? > squabble between two huge corporations I think this is just LaLiga using it's cultural and economical power, don't think Cloudflare or the courts should be making exceptions just so they can control how people watch football | | |
| ▲ | mlyle 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > why would they? Well, in this case, the alternative is all of Spain intermittently blocking lots of Cloudflare. But if Cloudflare bows to Spain in this case, every jurisdiction will want to pile up lots of special case rules for Cloudflare to try and implement. | | |
| ▲ | pxc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | LaLiga isn't Cloudflare's customer. They have no relationship. So why would Cloudflare rework their infrastructure just to instrument rapid blocking at their own expense as a favor to LaLiga? And if they don't, ISPs just break the Internet for each soccer match? This is a kind of coercion that makes no sense. Cloudflare has no obligation like this to LaLiga (and neither would a Spanish domestic CDN!). | | |
| ▲ | mlyle 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The reason why entities comply with the wishes of courts is because there's consequences if they don't. Consequences like being filtered. | | |
| ▲ | pxc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders! The very thing at issue is that LaLiga wants Cloudflare to do censorship on their behalf that Cloudflare, who has no contractual relationship with LaLiga, is not required to do by any legal framework in Spain or the US. Cloudflare literally wasn't even a party to the ruling by which LaLiga has been compelling Spanish ISPs to do the IP-level blocking. They're just an affected third-party because the blocking scheme the courts have allowed LaLiga to impose on ISPs is on a per-IP basis. Spain hasn't asked Cloudflare to do anything. Only LaLiga has acted like Cloudflare owes them a huge, expensive rework of their CDN's architecture for the purpose of censoring things for LaLiga purely as a favor to LaLiga. What LaLiga has over Cloudflare isn't a court order. It's a protection racket, or maybe a hostage situation, where court orders involving other parties are the gun held to the hostage's head. | | |
| ▲ | mlyle a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders! Nor did I say they did. The question was asked, "why would they [without an explicit order]" The answer is they probably shouldn't, but there's still an obvious incentive here. | |
| ▲ | drob518 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So, lawsuits against LaLiga from parties with affected sites would be the path forward, right? Those might be difficult in Spanish courts. | |
| ▲ | forty a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not sure why it shouldn't be cloudflare job to make sure they don't host illegal content. If my super market keeps distributing illegal goods, even if they remove it after a court order, they will end up having to close the whole market. Either they should police the content they serve themselves or they accept the right holders to do it (which sucks for everyone). Also they certainly willing take all their customers as hostage, as they could certainly split their network into legitimate customers and shaddy ones so the blocking is not so impactful, but I guess they prefer to make it as impactful as possible to be able to complain. | | |
| ▲ | pxc a day ago | parent [-] | | https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/reporting-abuse/ Anyone can report illegal content on Cloudflare and Cloudflare will remove it. The pirate streaming sites pop up only in or just before the first few moments of the game, and LaLiga insists they must be removed instantly in order to prevent their losses. So what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes. That involves more than being responsive when someone reports abusive content or dropping bad customers. That requires becoming a censorship machine that preemptively treats all new customers as criminals, and probably having some unaccountable AI drive the censorship process. (That latter seems to be what LaLiga is pushing Fastly to do.) That's beyond the legal obligations of infrastructure platforms, bad for the reliability of their service, and just a slice of what they'd have to do to rework their architecture to support this kind of preemptive censorship. | | |
| ▲ | Reason077 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > ” what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.” Yet this would actually be a better solution for everyone (except the pirates). 10 minutes seems like a reasonable response time that would allow a chance for human review. No football fan wants to have their viewing interrupted because they used a dodgy pirate site to watch it. Currently, pirates can simply use a VPN to get around the IP-level block while the huge collateral damage affects legitimate Cloudflare users. |
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| ▲ | gruez 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >why would they? Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs. |
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| ▲ | teaearlgraycold 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The US is captured by the Israeli lobby. Spain is captured by the football lobby. | |
| ▲ | Pay08 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | So what, do they just block a range of IP addresses and are then done with it? | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 2 days ago | parent [-] | | technically, LaLiga themselves doesn't even do the blocking. They have a court order from some years ago that allows them to compel all the individual ISPs to block any IP addresses they specify, with no oversight or review | | |
| ▲ | bartread 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This must negatively impact a huge number of businesses. Is there no move for them to all get together to take legal action against LaLiga to stop them doing this? | | |
| ▲ | hunterpayne 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is the country that takes a 2 hour nap every day. They also have a sleeping contest every year with a winner and everything. And Spain isn't hot like Mexico where folks take 2 hours off in the topically heat and make it up for it in the evening because that's more efficient. | | |
| ▲ | doetoe a day ago | parent [-] | | Have you ever spoken to a person from Spain? | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder a day ago | parent [-] | | or been to the south of Spain in summertime - it may not be Mexico-hot, but it's no picnic |
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| ▲ | miohtama 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Think of the all political donations this would lose |
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| ▲ | quadrifoliate 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Here's a good English-language article about it, with a timeline: https://daniel.es/blog/cloudflare-vs-la-liga/ Looks like same old regulatory capture. | | |
| ▲ | maest 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Also, a classic tweet from the Cloudflare CEO re their fight with Italians authorities re censorship: https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492 Everyone looks bad in this conflict. | | |
| ▲ | post-it 2 days ago | parent [-] | | How does this make Matthew look bad? | | |
| ▲ | AgentME a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Calling on JD Vance and Elon as if they're known for a principled respect for free speech is crazy. It just reads as unnecessary propaganda or a poorly-disguised threat from powerful friends. I'm generally inclined to agree with Cloudflare here and the post makes me question that. | |
| ▲ | encom 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Matt acting like he's a free speech absolutist. Hilarious. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Italy and Spain are the bad actors here. Not cloudflare. | |
| ▲ | nslsm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | HN in 2026: free speech is hilarious. | | |
| ▲ | encom 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You have it backwards. I'm the free speech absolutist. Cloudflare is not. |
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| ▲ | bethekidyouwant 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | On a scale of oppression he certainly leans towards free. |
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| ▲ | otherme123 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are some sites that stream a pirate signal of the football matches, and they stream through Cloudflare proxied IPs. They share the IP with thousands if not millions of other sites. When the match starts, Movistar (a big ISP, but also a TV platform that streams legally football matches) sues itself in the following terms: "we, Movistar TV, demand that Movistar ISP blocks the following IPs that are being used to stream our matches illegally", on a special and urgent procedure. The judge tells Movistar-ISP to block the IP, which they do in seconds. Now replace Movistar with the biggest ISPs in Spain, and you have more than 80% of the country with Internet capped for hours (except if you know how to use some kind of tunneling) As the pirates share the IP with so many sites, because the IP is actually a Cloudflare proxy, a big chunk of the internet goes down. Users complains, and Movistar ask Cloudflare to block the real IP and spare the rest. Cloudflare says that they cannot legally do that as no judge actually told them to. Our Spanish judges are historically inept when talking about copyright, internet, file sharing and similar stuff. Some of them might be more updated, but there has been cases that they ordered some publications to surrender their lithographic plates, because a cover has to be retired as late as 2007 (https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/07/20/espana/1184937587....). So I don't think they understand much more about what is an IP other than "a IP is a number assigned to a computer". And Movistar is quite happy with that. | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because LaLiga and football in general is what is governing Spain really. | |
| ▲ | bakugo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The website has a language selector on the right just below the initial screen, just FYI. | |
| ▲ | lentil_soup 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | to stop people pirating football streams while matches are on. Insanity | |
| ▲ | ShowalkKama 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | to """"""""""prevent piracy"""""""""" | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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