Within the different types of content, sporting events are one of the great claims of pirate pages, however, in Spain this is going to change since a court in Barcelona has given the green light to the proposal of La Liga and Movistar Plus + so that they can block these websites weekly without the need for a court order.
Football rights are one of the most precious assets, due to the enormous source of income they represent for those who have them, which is why there are web pages that broadcast them for free (and illegally) and without giving benefits to those who participate and broadcast the event is something highly persecuted by these institutions.
Until now, if a pirate website was detected, the procedure required filing a complaint and obtaining a court order that would allow the pirate page to be blocked. The main problem is that this process takes time, which allowed pirates to offer their content and change the URL so that the order could not be applied to them.
This measure has been known this week through a joint statement from La Liga and Movistar, which brought a joint lawsuit to the Mercantile Court No. 9 of Barcelona, so now both have the power to block pirate pages that retransmit any content to which they have the rights.
The judge has considered this action necessary after there have been “numerous cases of digital piracy that flagrantly affect the exploitation of their rights” as stated in the sentence. The measure is called “dynamic blocking”, which means that it will not be something specific, but that every week they will be able to block new URLs, IP addresses and domains without the need to obtain permission from a court.
In this way, the process to hunt down and block pirate web pages is streamlined, since the La Liga and Movistar teams will only have to find them to be able to put an end to them. This measure will come into force on August 8 (La Liga begins on August 12) and will be in force until the 2024/2025 season.