Spain’s fight against La Liga streaming pirates hurts thousands of innocent sites

The road to hell can indeed be paved with good intentions. Spain wants to stop the widespread practice of illegal La Liga streams but is affecting thousands of innocent websites in the process, it seems.

La Liga, Spain’s premier club soccer competition, has long been plagued with pirated streams of live matches.

Rightsholders – TV companies and streaming platforms – are rightly furious. Collectively, they’re paying billions each year for the right to legally broadcast La Liga, and each viewer choosing a pirated stream is a revenue loss.

So they were indeed very happy when in March, a court order obtained by La Liga and Telefonica, a Spanish multi-national broadband and telecommunications provider, said that Spanish internet service providers can now conduct broad blocking of live pirated sports streams.

These measures target shared Cloudflare infrastructure serving hundreds of pirate sites, especially illegal IPTV services. Telefonica recently bought the rights to broadcast La Liga matches in Spain for €1.2 billion ($1.36 billion).

La Liga itself has said that it currently blocks around 3,000 IP addresses every weekend, and the competition’s boss Javier Tebas said in late March that online piracy makes Spanish football lose approximately €600-700 million ($684-798 million) each season.

However, these broader blocking measures, although seemingly quite effective, have also resulted in a significant increase in overblocking reports. In other words, even though pirates sites are targeted, thousands of websites having nothing to do with online piracy are also blocked.

For instance, the Catalan domain name registry “PunctCAT foundation,” allowing organizations and individuals to associate with and promote the cultural Catalan identity, has reportedly heard from customers whose websites were blocked, even though they have no association with football or piracy.

“In recent weeks, some .cat domain holders have informed us that access to their pages, which have no connection to the broadcast of football matches, have been restricted during the broadcasts of La Liga matches,” the registry told its customers in an email.

“PuntCAT” also said it wasn’t ruling out a legal response, even though it was only actively monitoring the situation so far.

Moreover, regular developers are now waking up, too. According to TorrentFreak, they’re coming up with solutions to thwart site blocking and posting them on GitHub.