LaLiga: Cloudflare, Google and X Are Essential Piracy Facilitators

In a submission to the U.S. Trade Representative, LaLiga accuses Google, Cloudflare, and X of enabling pirate services to thrive. The submission is unusual; the Special 301 process requests recommendations concerning foreign countries. LaLiga also stands out for its country-specific complaints, nominating the UK and Germany for the Priority Watch List over piracy challenges.

 Every year, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative asks copyright holders to share input for its Special 301 Report.

Based on these recommendations, which center around copyright and piracy problems, the USTR compiles an annual list of countries that deserve extra attention.

By definition, the overview aims to identify foreign companies and policies that may hurt U.S. businesses. However, that doesn’t stop foreign entities from taking the opportunity to call out American companies for the same reason.

U.S. Piracy Facilitators

Last week, LaLiga, the organization behind Spain’s top football league, used the USTR’s request for submissions to point a finger at several U.S. tech companies, including Cloudflare, Google and X.

LaLiga recognizes that its comments go beyond the scope of the USTR’s efforts but believes that highlighting the piracy-facilitating role of these businesses is important.

“While it is not the primary focus of this submission, it is important to highlight the significant role that certain intermediary based in the United States, such as Google, Cloudflare, Coredeluxe and X (formerly Twitter), have played as essential facilitators in the continued rise of piracy throughout 2024.”

“These platforms and service providers offer critical infrastructure or services that enable piracy networks to thrive, including Anonymization, Content Delivery Network (CDN), Domain Name System, VPN, hosting, content indexing and social media promotion,” LaLiga adds.

LaLiga doesn’t go into detail on what it believes these companies do wrong, or how this could be addressed. That said, from previous reports we know some of the most common complaints.

For example, Cloudflare is often berated by rightsholders because it makes it less straightforward to pinpoint the hosting location of pirate sites and services. For its part, X has been criticized for not taking immediate action in response to takedown notices.

Global De-Indexing

We’re unaware of any common complaints against Coredeluxe. Regarding Google, however, LaLiga previously complained about pirated apps on Google Play, and pirate sites and services showing up in Google search.

Google recently decided to de-index pirate domains from search results in countries where these domains are blocked by court orders or administrative action. However, LaLiga said in August that the measure is insufficient.

“The effective solution that Google must implement and enforce is to implement mechanisms that allow for the complete global de-indexing of those websites and domains that accumulate a high number of de-indexing requests,” LaLiga said.

“In addition, it is proposed that Google adopt preventive control measures to prevent illegal streaming, IPTV services from being indexed in its search engine in the first place.”

UK and Germany

After criticizing American companies, LaLiga goes on to recommend several countries for inclusion on the USTR’s Special 301 watch lists. They include familiar names such as China and Russia, but also two clear outliers.

LaLiga recommends that the UK and Germany should be added to the USTR’s Priority Watch List. Reserved for countries with serious intellectual property problems that deserve increased attention, the Priority Watch List is the highest category available.

As justification for this nomination, LaLiga mentions a few examples of pirate sites and services that are presumably linked to these counties.

The UK and Germany are generally not seen as countries with serious shortcomings when it comes to copyright policy and enforcement. After two decades of Special 301 reports, neither country has ever made onto the Watch List, let along the Priority Watch List.

Interestingly, the UK and Germany are also the homes of LaLiga’s closest competitors, the Premier League and Bundesliga. But that must be a mere coincidence.

Whether any of LaLiga’s recommendations will be reflected in the USTR’s final Special 301 report remains to be seen.

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LaLiga’s recommendations are available here (pdf). They include the following countries.

– Priority Watch List: China, Peru, Hong Kong, Russia, Romania, UK, Germany, Estonia and Ukraine.

– Watch List: Argentina, Macao and Singapore.

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