Spanish court disagrees with La Liga over possible fines to NordVPN
It’s not over, but it’s something. That’s how the bosses at NordVPN are interpreting the news from Spain, where the Commercial Court of Cordoba has refused to punish the VPN company for alleged non-compliance with an order to block pirate football streams.
La Liga, Spain’s top club football competition, has been furiously – and desperately – fighting the illegal streaming of its matches.
Its stance is understandable: these streams hurt La Liga by causing an estimated annual financial loss of €600 million to €700 million for Spanish clubs.
Naturally, La Liga was overjoyed when, in February, the Commercial Court No 1 of Cordoba labeled VPN services as “technological intermediaries” and ordered them to actively block IP addresses that host illegal La Liga matches.
Moreover, the injunction specifically targeted NordVPN and ProtonVPN and was granted without the companies being heard. There was no immediate right of appeal, either.
Quite obviously, both VPN providers called the move unacceptable, also because they’re both incorporated outside the European Union. NordVPN is based in Panama, and Proton is headquartered in Switzerland.
The companies were additionally willing to talk about the dangers of overblocking. However, La Liga then doubled down and asked the court to punish the VPN firms with fines.
It didn’t work. NordVPN just announced that the Cordoba judge dismissed La Liga’s request for coercive fines.
According to NordVPN, the court accepted the technical evidence submitted by the company and ruled that it cannot be concluded that the firm had deliberately and without justification breached February’s order.
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In the blog post, the company explained that the order requiring them to block a list of IP addresses allegedly hosting illegal football streams would be extremely difficult to implement.
“First, those IP addresses change constantly, often within hours, so the lists supplied no longer matched the actual addresses by the time blocking could be carried out,” said NordVPN.
“What the ruling does is confirm something we said openly from day one – the technical concerns are real and evidenced, and a Spanish court has now recognized that,” the company added for good measure.
Of course, things are more nuanced if only because the court’s move is a procedural decision. The main proceedings still lie ahead.
Besides, NordVPN reportedly admitted to TorrentFreak that the court wasn’t actually calling the VPN provider’s experts right and La Liga wrong.
Still, there really is broader opposition growing against the Spanish blocking effort. Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub, Docker, and many smaller services have been intermittently inaccessible to Spanish users during match windows.
“Second, the type of blanket IP-level blocking demanded would have rendered thousands of entirely lawful websites inaccessible to users in Spain and beyond.”
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