LaLiga Isn’t ‘Fining’ IPTV Pirates For Viewing Streams, But For Providing Them

Suing people for consuming content illegally can be a risky endeavor for companies with brands to protect. Nevertheless, sports rightsholders now seem prepared to put brand integrity on the line in their fight against IPTV pirates. Spain's LaLiga is already mailing out 'fines', ostensibly to people who simply watched pirate streams. Predictably, there's more to it than that.

 When mainstream rightsholders say they don’t want to sue end users for consuming their content illegally, most actually mean it.

The recording industry famously tested the waters 20 years ago, learned from the experience, and never did it again. The major Hollywood studios have never done it and most likely never will.

The risk of targeting an innocent person has never gone away but simply targeting the ‘wrong’ person has the potential to transform a company’s carefully crafted social media interactions into a toxic hellscape overnight.

In their ongoing war against pirate IPTV, some sports rightsholders seem willing to give it a go anyway.

The Gamble For Top-Tier Football

The most popular football leagues in Europe are approaching the same issue in different ways. The richest, England’s Premier League, receives support from a public awareness and media campaign that by design or fortunate accident, gives the impression that pirate viewers face a constant threat of being held to account. Premier League takes no option off the table but to date hasn’t sued regular consumers of pirate streams.

Serie A’s controversial anti-piracy activities are well documented but Italy’s top league hasn’t sued or ‘fined’ pirate viewers either. Fines are often described as ‘imminent’, but even when they eventually arrive in the mail, any fine will be payable to the Italian authorities, not Serie A. A useful reputational firewall, at least for as long as it holds.

Spain’s LaLiga started mailing out ‘fines’ to supposed viewers of pirate IPTV streams earlier this year. As far as we’re aware, there’s no major awareness campaign or government involvement to provide cover in the event that everything goes horribly south. Indeed, LaLiga chief Javier Tebas doesn’t seem concerned by theories of reputational risk at all, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for not caring about what pirates think.

‘Users Are Under Constant Threat’

As previously reported, LaLiga wants pirate viewers to consider themselves a major part of the piracy problem. Where pirate IPTV providers and resellers face peril, pirate viewers should feel that anxiety too and for good reason; LaLiga will come for them too.

Clarity on the specifics was the first notable casualty of LaLiga’s looming war on pirate IPTV end users announced earlier this year. Yet despite everything, Spain’s top football league did indeed begin sending out legal threats in the summer that informed alleged IPTV pirates that a payment of hundreds of euros could prevent cases going to court.

Settlement letters posted in public are disconcertingly vague. They state that the recipient was identified by their IP address because records at their ISP showed that “connections have been made to the pirate platform” from where access [to illegal content] was provided.”

The suggestion in the settlement letters is that the recipient consumed content offered by a pirate site. However, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia publicly announced that those who simply viewed pirated streams would not be targeted by LaLiga.

A new batch of LaLiga settlement letters being reported in Spain seem to show that these apparently conflicting statements can not only co-exist, but actually make perfect sense.

Reduced Demands For Cash, More Detail on Alleged Offenses

A copy of a newer LaLiga settlement letter was recently uploaded by a user of Forocoches and shared by Xataka. Once again it’s made clear that payment of a cash settlement will prevent the recipient from ending up in court.

This letter proposes a settlement of €261.65, around €200 less than amounts proposed in previous letters. The most interesting aspect is how LaLiga managed to target someone who ‘watched a pirate IPTV stream’ when the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia promised that mere viewers would not be targeted.

LaLiga Had an Ace Up Its Sleeve

According to LaLiga’s letter, the recipient used a piece of software called Ace Stream to watch illegal streams of football matches. The significance of this cannot be understated; rather than streaming content directly from a pirate IPTV server, Ace Stream uses BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer transfers to share content among other users.

At the same time as viewing illegal streams, Ace Stream users become part of the distribution network. As an Ace Stream client downloads streams for viewing, it simultaneously uploads those streams to other Ace Stream users, whose clients download and upload to other Ace Stream clients as part of a larger swarm.

As a result, Ace Stream users are not “mere viewers” of pirate streams, they’re suppliers of pirate streams too. The fact that Ace Stream was placed on Spain’s piracy blocklist two years ago may even add a little more weight to LaLiga’s threats.

Javier Prenafeta, a lawyer at 451.legal, acknowledges that Ace Stream brings new challenges.

“In these cases, LaLiga has obtained the data of the users behind the IP addresses under the justification that they are not merely good-faith consumers without profit motive, because when they access the content they also share it, which implies a benefit,” Prenafeta told Xataka.

Those tempted to settle (at what actually appears to be a reasonable rate) are encouraged to consider the implications of signing the accompanying LaLiga declaration before doing anything.

“It would be acknowledging that they are giving access to illegal content, which could fall under the penal code. So the most advisable thing is that they consult with a lawyer.”

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