It really doesn't matter.

The issue isn't "some people don't pay for sports streams". The issue is that some corporate fucktards have managed, through the power of lobbying, backroom deals and blatant corruption, to get an engine of country-wide internet censorship to be created - and then abused on their behalf.

This isn't the first, or the tenth, time it happens. People should have been sued, fired and jailed after the first time they blocked the entirety of Cloudflare for inane "copyright" reasons - and yet, nothing was done, and the censorship persists.

Perhaps take some of the emotion out of it? I’m asking for perspective and history on the issue, not clueless as to why the situation is bad. This is a US hosted forum, the issue is happening in Spain. Perhaps clarity is called for that’s not specified in the article?

Why are you tone policing a victim of corporate abuse?

Because they’re swearing at me. Do you like to be aggressively attacked for trying to discuss something? I didn’t even ask anything offensive or insinuate that LaLiga was somehow in the right, yet the commenter chose to bite my head off. I didn’t ask the question to start a fight, I asked it because the article did not specify anything historical about the situation.

Just because you’ve been abused doesn’t give you the right to be a riled up aßhole to anyone that triggers your emotions.

Swore at you?

> The issue is that some corporate fucktards have managed

Yeah are you new to swear words?

That would be "swearing in your vicinity" not "swearing at you".

A distinction clear to those with long familiarity to swearing and swear words.

Swearing at someone directly or indirectly is irrelevant. I didn’t write any commentary that deserved such an emotional reaction. Go find a corporate stooge and call them that then instead of writing strongly worded emotional outbursts online at strangers seeking information in a casual conversation.

You don't appear to be familiar with the use of swearing and swear words about the globe and even within your own country by others, evidenced by your assertion that referring to a corporate stooge as a fucktard must be a sign of an emotional reaction.

Even your claim that the use of "fucktard" is somehow "strongly worded" indicates limited exposure to a wider world.

For your own peace of mind I recommend you steer well clear of both Scotland and Australia .. even the UK would likely far exceed your limit.

Cool.

Which part was swearing at you?

If you choose to be offended on behalf of LaLiga's fucktards? That's your problem, not mine.

I am incredibly pissed off about any attempt to enact Internet censorship - whether political or corporate in nature. And so should be you.

I can answer for Italy which has the same issue, and a similar "solution",and it's the first option.

Watching football has become really expensive in the last decade and people are fed up.

Also, sometimes you need different subscriptions to watch all the games of your team.

Meanwhile, piracy is cheap and convenient.

At least here in italy, for some people it's just too expensive to care about paying, for some people it's just that they don't want to pay for it even on cheaper plans which were launched recently at a reasonable - well, more or less - price.

We have a similar anti piracy shield and once we got some Google cdn down for half an hour. Imagine not being able to use Google drive because the football league is trying to block football piracy streams - which are trivially searchable online anyway

In the Netherlands, live streaming of Premier League matches is done by Viaplay (I'm guessing in other countries too?). Their service is very spotty, lots of buffering, especially during highly dynamic (e.g. important) parts of the matches, and they stream at very very low bitrate, often dropping down to 360p.

As a result, people cancel their subscriptions. To recuperate some of the losses, Viaplay now licenses one match every weekend to a third party streaming service, this year it is on Amazon Prime.

So, now besides the high cost and shoddy service, you suddenly need an additional streaming subscription to be able to view every match. Granted, the streaming on Prime is excellent though.

This weekend, the Prime match was Liverpool v Everton, which as a Dutchie is the most interesting match of the weekend (given Liverpool's title win last season, the Dutch trainer and several outstanding Dutch players).

Several friends of mine who are into football immediately quit their Viaplay subscription, so who knows how many matches will not be streamable through Viaplay next season?

As a legit customer you are constantly chasing an ever shifting landscape of poor quality and overpriced services. Meanwhile with an IPTV subscription you pay little, get high quality streams and have access to _all_ content.

Football is just ridiculous in general. They sell off different parts of the competitions to different services so you need to subscribe to multiple companies to watch them all. It’s just tremendous corporate greed at the expense of fans. Players are being bought for hundreds of millions - that money is all coming from increasing subscription costs and rinsing fans around the world.

Basketball is another one where there is stupidity.

I live in what my TV provider called a "dead zone".

I live in the NBA's "broadcast zone" for the Portland Trail Blazers. That means even with League Pass, I cannot watch their home games, because I am meant to watch them on my local TV provider.

But guess what, I don't live in the Seattle TV zone. So I don't have a local/any station that broadcasts Blazers game.

And the NBA doesn't care either. "Sure, you can only watch half of your team games, sucks to be you."

Rights holders can, at any time, make the distribution of games smooth and affordable.

Their choice to infinitely segment sports broadcast results in piracy.

If you want to watch all of your team's games you need to a) purchase an expensive monthly cable subscription from the company that holds the football rights. b) pay a sizeable sum on top, I think it's about 50 euros per month to be able to watch the actual matches.

This is just for La Liga games, you'll need to pay extra if your team plays in other competitions.

For personal viewing. How much do bars pay?

Does this matter? I want to watch the games at home, with my friends.

Sure. Me too. But I also sometimes want to watch the games at a bar, with my friends. And the rate they charge bars in Europe is extortionately high. I wouldn't be surprised if those are the primary targets in this crackdown.

La liga wants to get rid of illegal streams so they can ask for more money for the licenses.

Paid Streaming or TV is quite expensive. It's mostly because you have to buy the whole package which includes everything else the company provides. Like Golf or Nascar or whatever they find on ESPN 8.

Also paying for a stream only really benefits the rich clubs. The money la liga earns for tv rights is split between professional teams with Barcelona and the two Madrids receiving about 30% of the money. The other 17 teams get the rest. Some fans don't want to see them getting more money (small percentage but never underestimate fans)

The main issue isn't that they're blocking the streams: it's that the blocks are so broad they're blocking huge swathes of other parts of the internet. Instead of blocking somepiratesite.futbol they're blocking Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS, etc

You can't imagine how much you have to pay in Spain for the right of seeing a single La Liga match.

Oh wait, you cannot do that. You have to pay for all the championship together with the Champions League and what not.

Sky in Germany was infamous for not providing nearly close to enough servers to support streaming of high profile games. And their cable TV box used extremely sub-par SoCs which made for an atrocious user experience.

In addition the cost only went upwards while the offering reduced every season as Dazn and other players entered the field. I said goodbye to soccer a few years prior to Covid.

The reason is irrelevant. Only the private censorship perpertrated by the copyright industry matters.

The reason is relevant because I asked what the reason was. I asked this because I wanted to know how the people of Spain and Laliga got here, the history is relevant.

You may only want to focus on the rights violations but that doesn’t make the history and reasons irrelevant.

Is it a cultural thing? Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy. Certainly well into the 90s you could still buy pirated media, especially video games, from every mom and pop store.

I'm interested in hearing more about the evolution of copyright law wrt computer media in Spain. I see an article from 2001 describing how compiled software was not copyrightable in Spain at that time. [0] From [1] I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.

Having seen how Sweden changed their copyright law in response to the Pirate Bay website [2], I wish everyone knew that it wasn't always this way, and that states maintain their own rules. The idea that "no one shall copy any corporation's media, ever" is a recent propaganda success.

[0] https://www.mondaq.com/copyright/14472/technology-protection...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_file_sharing

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7978853.stm

> I see an article from 2001 describing how compiled software was not copyrightable in Spain at that time

Compiled software is not copyrightable in any country that I know of. Compilation is not an original creative process. The original software is copyrightable, and compiling it creates a (protected) derived work of it.

> I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.

The Pirate Bay is censored in Spain as much as it is on France.

Computers and copyright are fairly recent in Spain and Italy? This is astonishingly ignorant, if not simple ragebait.

Ah, yes, the ZX Spectrum arcade games and text adventures from the 80's in Spain, 'fairly recent'.

https://base.speccy.org/ProyectoBASE_Historia.html

The parent comment confuses Spain and Italy as if they were the same... as if Spain didn't had French and UK influences from the North at all since the 1600's and before... yeah sure.

Spain had and has picaresca as the Italians, of course... but we aren't 100% the same and it shows off. We used to buy legal games in the 80's because the prices plumetted down because of the piracy, and between the shaddy game loaders and having to wait 15 minutes per load, everyone wanted at least to buy one or two original games in order to play something without losing literal hours trying to tweak the casette player.

Italy in the meanwhile just resold foreing games as if they were local. Some Spaniards did the same too; but it had small powerhouses as Aventuras AD, Erbe Software and such, not just a few by any means.

I probably could have worded it clearer. I meant computers + copyright. As in there was no copyright on computer software.

It is not just bad wording. This is still a questionable remark that smells of wrong assumptions about southern EU (and thus gets people irritated).

Still false. There were already police raids for 'pirate' games in the 80s.

Example, July 1986 [0]: "Nine Madrid university students involved in a thriving pirated video game business"

--

  0: https://www.abc.es/archivo/periodicos/abc-sevilla-19860718-40.html

At least in italy is more of a "people with economic interest in football are also in politics and thus are able to shape policies for their profit"

> Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy

LOL, what did you smoke, man?

My bad, bad wording :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45327046

Man, Spanioards bought LEGAL ZX Spectrum games on book stores and such in the 80's as a solution for the rampant piracy. The companies themselves pushed down the prices for convenience.

Fairly recent innovations? Lol.

The Jupiter ACE manuals in Spanish must had to came from another dimension. The same with the books for the ZX Spectrum in Spanish and such. And banks and big corporations owning IBM PC's, yeah, sure, there was no software in Spanish in the 80's, sure...

Even my elementary school had DOS PC's with 5,25 floppies with Spanish and Basque translated games, even Logo... that in mid 90's.

On Copyright... I'm pretty sure Spain was bound to the Berna convention.

And, on piracy, in the 80's (in Spanish, your browser can translate it): https://www.retrogameshistory.com/2021/03/la-pirateria-espan...

My bad, bad wording :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45327046