To promote its product to TV broadcasters, La Liga wants to convince Google to remove pirate applications installed on Android devices.
Piracy does not only concern films and series, far from it. Sports broadcasts, which have largely shifted to pay channels over the past fifteen years, are widely used by illegal streaming and IPTV. This situation annoys all those involved in sport, and Javier Tebas, the boss of the Spanish Football League, in the first place.
IPTV as an alternative to expensive legal offers
Rights holders and federations have been playing cat and mouse with pirate platforms for a long time, but the Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, the equivalent of our LFP and organizer of the Spanish professional championships, is being particularly offensive this season.
Javier Tebas announced that 58 pirate Android applications offering live sports broadcasts had been removed during the first 5 days of the new La Liga season. They have been downloaded a total of 4 million times, for 800,000 users in Spain. On iPhone, the figures are more measured: there are 1 million pirate users worldwide of these applications, including 300,000 in Spain.
Except that these interventions are far from being sufficient to stem the phenomenon. Deleting applications from the Play Store or other stores is just an additional barrier, which any even slightly motivated user can easily circumvent. And above all, for installations already carried out, the damage is done.
Technically feasible, legally complicated
Aware of this, La Liga wants nothing more and nothing less to remove pirate applications already installed on devices. “ We are talking with Google and other platforms to [que les applis] can be located on these mobile phones “, says Javier Tebas.
According to him, it is possible from a technological point of view to carry out this type of operation. He cites the example of child pornography, the contents of which can be identified, but which nevertheless faces legislative concerns for the establishment of an effective suppression system.
Javier Tebas is in any case motivated to remove IPTV services from at least 1.1 million mobiles in Spain (800,000 Androids and 300,000 iPhones). Will he win his case? Its objective seems ambitious, but the lobbies for the protection of intellectual property appear more and more powerful and armed to bend the platforms.
What the La Liga president does not say is that it is increasingly difficult and expensive to watch Spanish football in Spain, especially since the latest allocation of TV rights to Movistar and DAZN.
Source : TorrentFreak
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