For people on a budget and even for those who are not, there’s a lot to like about free, ad-supported television; FAST for short.

Available via the internet on almost any device, streaming services like Pluto TV, Tubi, The Roku Channel, and Freevee, offer TV shows and surprisingly large movie libraries, delivered across hundreds of channels.

Completely free to use, with quality improving all the time, FAST services are growing in popularity thanks to almost no barriers to entry.

Caveats Create Niche Market

FAST’s main quid pro quo is the installation of an official app through which viewing takes place. Easy to find on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon, and elsewhere, these apps act as a viewing portal, video player, and electronic program guide (EPG), all rolled into one. They’re also adept at pumping user data, including viewing habits and associated behavior, back to providers to ensure that free ad-supported TV makes up for lost currency through a firehose of advertising intelligence.

Another issue with the FAST approach is that availability on almost any device isn’t the same as being available on all devices. While PC users are catered for via a web browser, those accustomed to viewing using a dedicated player like VLC, or the full IPTV-approach of IPTVnator , are not. Enthusiasts of TVHeadend , NextPVR , and indeed Jellyfin , Kodi, and Plex users with a NextPVR plugin, face the same problem.

Or would, if a solution hadn’t already been found.

Fast Solutions to FAST Problems

Developer Matt Huisman solves problems like these for fun. Helping to ensure that availability is universal, behind the scenes Huisman’s software generates .m3u8 playlist files for many FAST services and makes those files available on his site .

Designed to be used as live links rather than downloaded, these .m3u8 files are not only convenient and easy to use. They automatically update when providers change their stream URLs. This provides a seamless experience, and for TVHeadend users, Huisman explains, helps to eliminate the annoyance of existing channels being detected as new channels when their URLs change.

How the .m3u8 files are generated isn’t something most users need to concern themselves with. For anyone hoping to understand DAZN’s DMCA takedown notice, filed against Huisman’s VPS host Vultr, after those details were handed over to DAZN by Cloudflare, a basic understanding of Huisman’s service is an absolute must.

Basics of Pluto TV and Huisman’s Playlists

It’s important to note that Pluto TV’s stream URLs are public. Streams are supplied via regular HTTP URLs (not HTTPS) in .m3u8 playlist format. No systems need to be bypassed to access the streams from a technical perspective although as the image shows, the URLs are pretty long and carry some identity-type strings. For the sake of privacy, if any exists, some chunks are redacted.

Huisman’s software acts as a 302 redirect , a temporary redirect from one URL to another. In this case, there’s a redirect from Huisman’s site to the latest legal stream available at Pluto TV, an alternative to hard-coding non-permanent stream URLs in the .M3U8 playlist file.

A loose analogy can be found in domain names, IP addresses and DNS. Huisman’s URLs are always the same (like domains) because when stream URLs change (IP addresses) the .m3u8 file quickly points to the right location but remains static to playlist users.

We’ll return to other important functionality shortly, but these are the basics needed to understand DAZN’s DMCA notice.

DMCA Notice – Copyright Infringement on DAZN Content

A notice with the title above begins by explaining DAZN’s role as a streaming service offering live sports events and on-demand streaming in territories worldwide. DAZN is the exclusive licensee of copyright in the audio-visual production of various live sporting content and events, the notice adds, before claiming the following (emphasis ours) :

[DAZN] is also the creator of and thereby the owner of copyright in the original content created for DAZN (DAZN live linear channels) that have been infringed upon and hosted on your platform , pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. Section 512.

“The unauthorized and infringing material can be found at the following URLs,” the takedown notice adds. (small sample of URLs below)

Identify Original Content Infringed and the Allegedly Infringing Content

These two pieces of information are the basics and basis for a valid DMCA takedown notice; identify the content owned and identify the location where the allegedly infringing content can be found.

“The copyrighted work that has been infringed upon consists of DAZN live linear channels DAZN 1, DAZN 2, DAZN Fights, DAZN Pluto, and DAZN Womens for which DAZN has not authorized the use of its copyrighted material on the aforementioned websites,” the notice reads.

This paragraph correctly identifies the original content but since the URLs listed in the DMCA notice (“the unauthorized and infringing material”) link to official stream URLs on the Pluto TV service, it appears that DAZN’s legal streams, on Pluto TV itself, are the original content and the allegedly-infringing content.

This inevitable conclusion is underlined in evidence supplied in support of the DMCA takedown notice. A screenshot of VLC clearly shows a live football match to which DAZN owns the rights, with one of Huisman’s redirect URLs listed as the ‘location’. To a casual onlooker, this seems to imply that the match is being illegally streamed from the URL on Huisman’s site when it’s actually being streamed directly from a URL on Pluto TV’s servers.

The lack of clarity certainly caused issues at Huisman’s host, which requested the developer to remove his entire domain due to the allegations in the DMCA notice. If the playlist had been the type often found on IPTV piracy sites, which typically contain links to pirated DAZN streams being made available from servers operated by pirates, that would make complete sense. That’s not the case here, however.

What Was The Aim of the Notice?

While the nature of this takedown notice always seemed destined to cause confusion, when DAZN files DMCA notices against pirate sites, no such confusion exists. A typical example takes a few seconds to read and less to understand.

The goal is the same in both notices, i.e. to have the URLs listed in the notice taken down. In that respect the notice targeting Huisman appears to have achieved its goals; as of this morning all URLs return ‘404 Not Found’.

However, in common with links that point to infringing content, the legal content linked in Huisman’s playlists also (and obviously) remains up. That raises the question of what DAZN hoped to achieve and why.

We don’t know for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume that another aspect of Huisman’s playlists may have implications for the DAZN bottom line. While the official Pluto TV playlist URLs are extensive and continue long after ‘.m3u8’ to facilitate the delivery of adverts, Huisman’s URLs end at ‘.m3u8’ and lack any additional advertising/tracking functionality.

In short, users see DAZN channels directly from Pluto TV’s servers but with no advertising whatsoever.

Again, just a theory, but trying to crowbar an ad-blocking complaint into a regular DMCA takedown notice would likely meet challenges. There’s no statement in the DAZN notice to indicate an ad-blocking issue, so we have to assume that isn’t the case here. However, the prospect conjures up all kinds of possibilities, especially in Germany where the DAZN channels in question are broadcast on Pluto TV.

In 2019, German publisher Axel Springer sued the company behind Adblock Plus, claiming that since adblockers “change the programming code of websites” that amounts to copyright infringement. A district court went on to dismiss the copyright claims , and the case.

The court further noted that prevention of ad-blocking would represent a “disproportionate encroachment” on users’ freedoms to make various choices, including not loading images to save bandwidth, deactivating Javascript, or block pop-ups or tracking elements.

For Huisman, everything is actually very straightforward.

“In my mind – no matter what the destination URL is – at the end of the day – it’s a simple redirect/shortcut. It’s the exact same thing as TinyURL or other URL shorteners,” the developer concludes.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Another day, another report from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment announcing the demise of yet another large piracy site, spanning several domains.

On this occasion the main target was WatchWrestling.ai, a site that until recently specialized in wrestling events by leading promotions including WWE, AEW, Impact, ROH and NJPW. These shows are extremely popular and traffic figures cited by ACE back that up, and then some.

“Over the past year, watchwrestling.ai and its associated domains have reached more than 253 million visits. Most of the traffic originated from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Canada,” the anti-piracy coalition reports.

ACE/DAZN Tag Team

ACE says that it worked closely with DAZN to take down WatchWrestling. DAZN is already a member of ACE but given the streaming service’s interests in the Impact promotion , it’s possible that specialist knowledge came into play.

ACE said it identified and then confronted the site’s owner in Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India. This so-called ‘knock-and-talk’ approach has been successfully deployed many times over the past several years and DAZN seems happy with the results here.

“DAZN has invested significant amounts in building a successful business around combat sports, helping fund the development of MMA and boxing, as well as providing the best quality content and service for fans,” says Ed McCarthy, Chief Operating Office of DAZN Group.

“To continue to invest, DAZN has to be able to protect its intellectual property. The enforcement work ACE undertakes, as part of its joint Sports Piracy Task Force initiative, is a critical element of this work.”

A Closer Look at WatchWrestling

As mentioned earlier, WatchWrestling.ai appears to have been the priority target but as an individual domain it can’t account for 253 million annual visits. In July the domain received around 8.7m visits according to SimilarWeb data, but in August appeared to lose considerable traffic, with just 7.8m visits reported.

After losing another two million monthly visits in September, ACE turning up in India obviously had a negative impact. So, for the sake of building up a picture, we’ll assume an average of 9 million visits per month over the last year, giving us a total of 108 million annual visits for the .ai domain. That leaves us with just 145 million visits still to find.

The domain WatchWrestling.in didn’t put up any kind of a fight. Using the same Google Analytics tag as the .ai domain made it extremely easy to find, but with just 289,000 visits in July (roughly 3.5 million pa), 140 million visits still need to be accounted for.

With around 462K visits per month, in theory WatchWrestling.gg provides a welcome five million or so visits per year. Unfortunately historical traffic data is thin, but since the domain has an official redirect to ACE, we’ll count its traffic anyway, before anyone notices.

140 Million Annual Visits….For Someone Else to Find

With ACE sometimes reluctant to provide the full picture for operational and other reasons, digging below the surface for additional information is simply routine. Here we ran into multiple issues.

A domain linked with India is currently redirecting to ACE. It used to be a movie and TV show streaming site but right now its many sub-domain redirections are proving an irritant , and may not even be part of the equation.

And then there are the look-a-likes, clones, and other variants that look like WatchWrestling, many with similar domains, that either carry exactly the same or substantially the same content. It may transpire that some of these are destined to be handed over to ACE, the truth is we just don’t know.

At times like these, the scale of the task ahead for groups like ACE comes fully into perspective. Still, taking 250+ million annual visits out of the market is still a massive achievement.

Not quite on the level of events back in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcers table, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Un nouvel acteur, encore méconnu du grand public en France, veut diffuser la Ligue 1 en France. Son nom ? DAZN.

Droits TV de la Ligue 1 : le “Netflix du sport” rêve de rafler la mise

Selon les informations du journal L'Équipe, seuls DAZN et beIN SPORTS se sont présentés à l'appel d'offres de la LFP qui a, sans surprise, échoué. Les négociations vont se poursuivre au gré à gré, sans doute avec le retour d'autres acteurs. [Lire la suite]

Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

Football, basket, NFL, boxe, lutte… DAZN est un service de streaming spécialisé dans la diffusion de compétitions sportives. Discret en France depuis plusieurs années, il entreprend en 2023 de devenir un acteur majeur des médias. [Lire la suite]

Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

La Ligue de football professionnel (LFP) lance le 17 octobre un appel d'offres pour les droits de la Ligue 1 et la Ligue 2 entre 2024 et 2029. Des enchères déjà historiques à cause de l'absence de Canal+. Elles pourraient encore plus pousser le football français dans l'ère du streaming. [Lire la suite]

Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

Following intense pressure from rightsholders for lawmakers to sign off on tough legislation to block pirate IPTV services in Italy, pens were put to paper in July, and it was all systems go for the new season.

With the nation holding its breath for what was about to come next, nothing much happened. Around 100 pirate service ‘violations’ were reportedly identified on the first day of the season early August, but no sites or services were blocked. The parties responsible for blocking had not yet completed a required technical roundtable and that remains the case today.

Some media outlets framed the lack of action on the first days of the season as a failure, especially in light of claims that piracy is killing Italian top-tier football. Whether that prompted DAZN’s decision to start firing off applications for urgent site blocking measures late August is unclear, but that’s exactly what the streaming platform did.

AGCOM Announces DAZN Success

Italy’s telecoms regulator revealed DAZN’s successful applications in an announcement titled “SERIES A AND SERIES B: AGCOM BLOCKS 45 PIRATED WEBSITES.” After blocking thousands of websites over the years with little fanfare, AGCOM’s announcement was somewhat out of the ordinary and may indicate how important site-blocking has become.

“The action of the Communications Regulatory Authority is intensified for the combating the illegal offer of live sports content. The Authority, also following the numerous requests received from DAZN, as owner of the rights for the broadcast of Serie A championship matches and Serie B, has issued numerous precautionary orders,” the announcement reads.

AGCOM also thanked Italy’s ISPs for their “active collaboration” in disabling access to a claimed 45 pirate sites said to have broadcast football matches illegally during the first two games of the season. After silently blocking thousands of sites over the years, ISPs being thanked in public is a rare event.

U.S. Law Enforcement Wanted Sites Gone Too

During the FIFA World Cup competition in December 2022, U.S. law enforcement agencies launched a domain seizure campaign . Homeland Security agents confirmed the initial action and a few days later, followed up with more seizures .

Among the targets was the popular SoccerStreams which later announced its own retirement from the game. As the dust settled, affiliated brands including NFLbite, NBAbite, and Footybite seemed to emerge unscathed, at least if one accepts that clones, mirrors, new domains, and other factors form part of the equation.

Documents filed by DAZN link ‘Soccer Streams’ with two pirate streaming platforms; nflbite.to and footybite.to. In its application for precautionary blocking measures, the streaming platform notes that footybite could be accessed via a link on nflbite. That hyperlink was enough for AGCOM to deal with them at the same time.

“The elements described [in the application] highlight a hypothesis of serious violation, due to the continuity of the conduct over the period of every day of the championship, the systematic nature of the violation, and the significant value of the audiovisual production rights of the championship affected by the conduct,” AGCOM agreed.

Kooora365, Elixx, Nizarstream

In a filing dated August 25, DAZN reported that sports streaming website kooora365.com carries “a significant amount of links that give access to the broadcasts of Serie A championship matches.”

Another platform, Elixx.xyz, reportedly provided free access to matches broadcast between August 19 and August 21, the first days of the Serie A season. “The digital works were thus transmitted in violation of copyright law,” DAZN advised.

For these sites and another streaming platform (nizarstream.xyz) DAZN requested “urgent and precautionary measures” to disable access to “audiovisual content disseminated illegally.”

It’s a pattern that continued in dozens of filings against similar sites, for largely identical reasons.

And the List Continues

Other domains against which DAZN sought precautionary blocking measures include the following:

calciostreaming.click, futbolmoderno.info, skystreaming.link, bdnewszh.com, nopay.info, nbatv.site, futbolonline.me, freestreams- live1.top, hesgoal.today, hesgoal.info, flash-24.live, 1stream.soccer, pirlotv.app, pirlo.tv, rojadirectaenvivo.fr, futbolonlinetv.club, koooralive.online, lacasadeltikitakatv.net, pirlotv.uk, calcio.ws, kooora4life.com, sportzone.la, rojadirectahd.tv, rojadirectatv.uno, pirlotvonline.org, funhdgames.xyz, hahasport.me, pirlotvlive.es, pirlotv.site, fotnet24.com, p2pstreams.live, redstream.online, calciostreaming.online, poscitechs.com, rojadirectatvhd.it, pirlotvonline.fr

Based on principles including proportionality, AGCOM instructed local internet service providers to implement DNS blocking against the domains within two days of its notification. Any visitors to the domains will be redirected to a notice explaining that the domains were blocked on AGCOM’s instructions.

Serie A reports that another 2,000 sites have just been submitted for blocking, a figure that represents more than half of all domains currently on Italy’s ISP blocking list.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

With pirate IPTV services first seeping and then exploding into the mainstream around 2016/17, the launch of streaming service DAZN provided hope of a viable alternative.

Initially made available in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Japan, DAZN’s mission to provide affordable access to live and on-demand sports content was exactly what fans had been crying out for. Having grown tired of waiting, millions had already switched to pirate IPTV services but with a new approach, fresh-faced DAZN might even begin to win some back.

We are basically saying pay-per-view sucks

In December 2018, with Mexico’s Canelo Álvarez set to take on Britain’s Rocky Fielding the very next day, the Evening Standard interviewed DAZN’s then-CEO, Simon Denyer. After securing an eight-year boxing rights deal worth $1 billion, the plan was to ditch expensive one-off payments for big events in favor of steady, $10-per-month subscription packages.

“We are basically saying pay-per-view sucks,” Denyer said .

DAZN’s marketing drilled that message home – and then some.

Even those with a fundamental understanding of the boxing business could’ve predicted how this was likely to pan out.

The world’s best fighters live for big paydays, specifically the multi-multi-multi million dollar kind that are typically sustained by a solid PPV model. So, after onboarding subscribers on a PPV-sucks basis, DAZN told its customers that big fights would be available on the DAZN platform, on a PPV basis.

With other market forces already biting hard, DAZN followed up with a recent announcement heralding huge price increases for its regular subscription packages.

In the wake of almost doubling standard subscription rates in the United States and other key markets, DAZN will have to work hard to win new subscribers. Retaining the 20 million customers it already has will be a challenge too, but one that can be made easier by eliminating cheaper competitors operating in the same market.

DAZN Joins Rivals to Fight Piracy

Having lost more than $6 billion since launch in 2016, with an operational loss of $1.3 billion in 2021 alone, DAZN’s affordable content strategy appears to have issues. In 2021 it acquired soccer match rights in Italy and Germany, but since they are incredibly expensive, that meant doubling the price of subscriptions in those countries.

In a move to ensure that customers have no cheaper options, this week global anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment announced that DAZN had become its latest member. Along with dozens of other corporations facing similar issues, DAZN will help to disrupt pirate streaming services all over the world.

“Intellectual property theft of live sports content is an industry issue, negatively impacting all sports and sports fans, and it needs a global concerted effort to meaningfully tackle it. ACE is the natural home for the Sports Piracy Task Force, given their track record, reputation, and experience in delivering effective programs of action,” says Shay Segev, DAZN Group CEO.

ACE Sports Piracy Task Force

Launched this week, the ACE Sports Piracy Task Force currently consists of beIN Media Group and DAZN, but the plan longer term is to bring other sports rightsholders on board to tackle what is increasingly viewed as a global threat.

“With every new member, our global network becomes more powerful and more effective at targeting and shutting down the piracy operators that threaten the media, entertainment and live sports economy and consumers,” says Jan van Voorn, Head of ACE and Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Content Protection at the MPA.

DAZN Chief Operations Officer Ed McCarthy describes the move as good for broadcasters and fans alike.

“Working with ACE, beIN, and other broadcasters and rights holders, the task force will pursue the criminal operators who are damaging sport at all levels, often using fans’ credit cards and data [for] illegal purposes. DAZN stands with ACE in the fight to eradicate the global theft of content,” McCarthy says.

Sports Rights Cost Billions

For perspective on what helps to drive up subscription prices and provide oxygen to illegal IPTV providers, the cost of broadcasting licenses is informative.

In 2021, DAZN won the rights to screen live Serie A soccer matches in Italy for three seasons. That deal will cost the company $2.7 billion. In the same year, DAZN and Movistar won the rights to broadcast Spanish soccer matches for five seasons. According to LaLiga, that deal is worth 4.9 billion euros ($5.37 billion).

A deal in the UK to screen Premier League matches is split unevenly between Sky, BT and Amazon. It covers just two seasons (2023/24 and 2024/25) and is believed to be worth in the region of £5.1 billion ($6.4 billion).

DAZN chief executive Shay Segev recently told The Times that obtaining Premier League rights is a priority for the company. Counterintuitively, a successful bid could also fuel piracy.

UK football fans currently need to subscribe to three streaming services to watch all available matches. DAZN getting in on the action raises the prospect of UK fans having to subscribe to four platforms to watch all televised matches. Or maybe even five, if Apple decides to get involved .

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Last month the European Commission (EC) issued a call for evidence to support an incoming “toolbox” of measures to combat live sports piracy.

The announcement followed a huge campaign by rightsholders last October. Organizations and companies, including the MPA, UEFA, Premier League, beIN, LaLiga, Serie A, Sky, and BT Sport, called on the EC to introduce new law that would compel intermediaries to take pirate streams offline within minutes of a complaint.

After denying the request , the EC offered an opportunity for rightsholders and other stakeholders to file submissions detailing their problems along with possible solutions actionable under existing law.

Most major stakeholders filed submissions close to the deadline late Friday. The majority were filed by sports leagues and organizations, broadcasters, and/or affiliated anti-piracy groups. Cloudflare, CCIA Europe, and an Austrian ISP coalition represented the internet/comms/tech sector.

The Voices of Football

Despite being framed as a process to protect all live sports, it’s clear that the primary focus is to prevent European and UK football matches from appearing on pirate IPTV and similar web-based services. It therefore makes sense to focus on the demands of entities such as the Premier League, affiliated broadcasters, and the anti-piracy groups tasked with protecting their rights.

The Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) represents football leagues and their broadcasters all over Europe. AAPA members played a key role in the campaign last October, and their current position remains completely unchanged.

“As signatories to the Call To Action to End Live Piracy Now, we would like to restate that an EU legislative instrument still remains the most efficient and effective way to tackle piracy of live content within and across Member States,” AAPA begins.

In the knowledge that’s not going to happen anytime soon, AAPA notes that since the purpose of the exercise is to “ prevent ” online piracy, the main focus should be on the immediate removal of infringing content via the notice and takedown mechanism.

What is a ‘Timely’ Takedown?

“The issue we have always had to face is the delayed response, if any, from online intermediaries that have been notified. The recently adopted Digital Services Act (DSA) makes no meaningful change to the concept of ‘expeditious’ removal currently enshrined in EU law,” the AAPA writes.

“The latter is open to interpretation from online intermediaries which, in many cases, means they will simply either not respond to notices or do so hours or days after the end of the live event. Many of them will exploit all ambiguities in the law to avoid acting at all – never mind expeditiously – which is why concrete measures need to be taken.”

To empower rightsholders in the face of slow or even total non-compliance, the AAPA says that clarification of takedown terms would allow it to build on the concept of “timely” removals introduced in the DSA. Since accurately identifying infringing content is reportedly straightforward, non-compliant intermediaries should be held responsible for any infringement.

“As live content is almost always watermarked and/or fingerprinted there is no question about identifying the stolen content which means the removal should be immediate and, in any case, well before the event terminates. In case online intermediaries do not remove access to the content in a timely manner, they should be held responsible for the harm caused to rights holders.”

If fingerprints are so easily detected and subscriber/device-level fingerprinting is available from multiple security vendors, that raises the question of why cutting off sources of infringing content isn’t a better option than battling to have streams taken down by uncooperative third parties. Perhaps we’ll hear more on this in due course.

EU-Wide Implementation of Proactive ISP Blocking

In several EU member states and the UK, rightsholders already obtain court injunctions that require ISPs to block pirate sites when they try to evade blocking. These ‘dynamic’ injunctions are useful but ‘live’ injunctions are favored by rightsholders tackling IPTV services since they offer even more flexibility.

In broad terms, some European courts authorize live injunctions with particular aims in mind, protecting football matches or PPV boxing events, for example. To thwart the efforts of pirate services seeking to evade specified domain or specified IP-address-based blocking, rightsholders are given the power to identify in advance any online locations that are likely to be used for piracy in the near future.

These are relayed to Internet service providers and rendered inaccessible, sometimes before events even begin. As such, live blocking injunctions are popular with rightsholders, but they’re not available in every member state. AAPA says this imbalance should be addressed by harmonizing this type of enforcement across the EU.

“The Commission should seek to create a level playing field and therefore replicate across the EU a powerful but carefully used approach to live blocking orders, bearing in mind that such actions shall not exclude rights holders who cannot act on the legal ground of copyright,” the anti-piracy group notes.

Cloudflare: Tackle Infringement at the Source

Cloudflare’s submission begins with an overview of the company’s approach to copyright infringement and examples of how it cooperates with rightsholders seeking to protect their content from piracy.

Cloudflare then moves on to the Digital Services Act (a common theme in many submissions) and the mechanisms it offers for dealing with illegal content, in ways that are proportionate to the harm, while offering transparency, due process, and remedy for incorrect actions.

“We believe those same standards must apply to any actions in the Commission’s toolkit for combating online piracy of live content,” Cloudflare informs the EC.

“The DSA assesses that the best way to address content challenges is at the source. Under the model outlined in the DSA , this is done by alerting hosting providers and owners of websites, who have the ability to remove content at a granular level, and who have an obligation to remove or disable access to it expeditiously under article 6.

“Article 9 of the DSA also poses clear conditions on orders to act against illegal content, which includes, amongst others a well-defined legal basis, the identity of the issuing authority and available redress mechanisms. From this, it follows that notice and take down orders should be targeted at the host of the live streamed content.”

Zero Transparency and Inevitable Blunders

Targeting infringing content at the source is not how rightsholder-favored dynamic/live injunctions work, quite the opposite in fact.

Instead of targeting sources of infringing content, blocking injunctions work on a regional level by ordering local ISPs to prevent internet users from accessing illegal streams, will leaving the streams intact. Rightsholders say that uncooperative hosting companies leave them with no other choice, and in fairness, that’s often the case when dealing with hosts of pirate services.

The problem – which is only getting worse as blocking injunctions develop – is the total lack of transparency which in turn fosters an environment of unaccountability. On one hand, rightsholders insist that if pirates obtain information relating to blocking, blocking becomes easier to counter. Since judges make decisions on the basis that their instructions will be carried out, all parties agree to render the blocking process completely opaque.

On the other hand, a complete lack of outside scrutiny means that when mistakes are made, and innocent third parties suffer due to erroneous or abusive blocking, no one is held to account. Certainly, no company, group or organization offers a public apology or compensation for those affected.

This isn’t a flaw in the system either – dynamic/live blocking and administrative website blocking programs are secretive by design, with the latter often operated under voluntary agreements. According to Cloudflare, blocking by IP address – which is favored against IPTV services – “often has serious unintended, unavoidable, and largely unreported consequences.”

Thousands of Legal Websites Have Been Blocked

As previously reported, ISPs in Austria were compelled to block Cloudflare itself in 2022, even though they knew that was wrong.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, input from ISPs was no longer deemed necessary – all they had to do was blindly follow instructions and the letter of the law. It appears that Cloudflare has seen much, much worse.

“In another Member State, an ISP with a voluntary arrangement to block allegedly infringing content has, on multiple occasions, blocked thousands of unrelated websites using our services for its users,” Cloudflare’s submission reveals.

“Without any court oversight, this overblocking in some cases took days to remedy. Even though the Commission has focused on critical infrastructure reporting on outages in the NIS Directive, efforts to block for reasons of copyright infringement do not result in reporting on its unintended consequences, which look like outages for external parties.

“This lack of public awareness means we see few incentives for rightsholders or the ISPs involved to assume accountability for the overblocking, publicly describe what had happened, or represent that they would take steps to prevent overblocking in the future.”

In summary, stakeholders in the football sector believe that the Digital Services Act may offer opportunities to take infringing content down more quickly, while an expansion of ISP blocking across the EU may help to block content that doesn’t get taken down.

Cloudflare also supports the DSA’s takedown provisions but expects promised levels of transparency too. Infringing content should only be taken down at source though; not only because some deputies are a little bit trigger happy but because blocking does nothing to remove the source of the problem.

Image credits: Pixabay ( 1 , 2 )

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.