I was unaware of this controversy so in brief:
1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable
2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.
3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court)
4. Based on this, they tell ISPs to block pretty much all of Cloudflare in Spain.
5. Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world, and that many Spanish utilities and civil resources use Cloudflare.
Interesting. My gut is that it’s hard to beat La Liga on their home turf, as evidenced by not even being invited to the court hearings which shut you down across all of Spain.
Long term, I’d guess CF wins this one? Probably they will have to escalate in some way to Eurozone courts, although I have no idea how this might work. No cloud business could meet the standard put forward by La Liga; but also there are only so many CDN companies. Meantime I guess illegal streamers can move to Google and see which legal group wins that battle.
one extra thing to mention is he role of Telefonica here. they are both an ISP that needs to apply the blocks, but also its subsidiary "Telefonica Audiovisual", who holds rights for the football, is a plaintiff.
one of the claims were that this is somewhat a procedural fraud since the plaintiff (Telefonica Audiovisual) and the defendant (Telefonica Spain) is technically the same thing. the order was granted after the defendants admitted, and therefore there wasn't any hearing with CF.
What’s even more confusing is how can a Spanish court just order a legitimately registered taxpaying Spanish business (assuming cloudflare has done so) to shut down their services without even a chance to provide an argument?
They didn't order Cloudflare to shut down, they ordered ISPs to block any IP LaLiga claims is hosting pirated football. The president of LaLiga "Javier Tebas" also called Cloudflare a criminal organisation for enabling and making a profit off anything including child pornography (without any evidence of this, of course, just his word).
Now, there is also a conflict of interest, because Telefonica (the main telecom provider here, think Deutsche Telekom in germany or any formerly-public ISP) is also a rights holder to some football, meaning their interest is to block everything instead of their internet users, who suddently can't work on Github, visit Twitter or many other large sites; or even can't buy in many places online because Redsys (the largest payment processor here) also uses Cloudflare to protect their infra, and Cloudflare IPs were being blocked indiscriminately. All of this while being able to force other ISPs to block those IP ranges too, and without any possible recourse by either Cloudflare or the sites themselves, which according to Tebas "are only used by 4 nerds who like to complain".
> 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.
And DDoS protection.
Sports broadcast piracy has a history of serious organized crime involvement, and then some, such as https://www.theregister.com/2002/03/13/murdoch_company_crack... where the allegation was NDS did the hacking and leaked the keys of the rival tech to various mob groups for exploitation.
And not just DDoS protection, but privacy. Cloudflare offers a huge amount of privacy protection which causes huge headaches for IP holders. You can read online about the feedback loop of Cloudflare/OVH for example sending automated notices back and forth. Usually the process is:
1. IP holder representative sends notice to Cloudflare 2. Cloudflare sends automated notice to account manager 3. Cloudflare informs person from step 1 of who actually hosts the site 4. Person from #1 emails web host who is probably a shady company who in turn ignores email 5. Nothing happens
> 5. Nothing happens
Then lobby the government to change the laws or other requirements so that any IP holder can have a more effective process.
The solution is not to hack some workaround.
I'd prefer to deal with the mafia than Rupert fucking Murdoch.
This is kind of a cute thing that wanna-be-rebels may enjoy trying on, much like some hipster who buys a leather jacket. But you don't. Believe me. You don't.
But for fun, go pay for a legit ticket to watch a movie like "The Godfather" or "The Irishman." Count the dead bodies.
tbf, you only get hit (punched) if you don't pay back, and you only end up dead if you don't take the hint from the punch.
Back in the 90s when most people didn't have broadband internet or CDROM burners piracy was very big business.
If you mean bootlegs, then it's been big business for way longer than the 90s.
Electronic bootlegs, most likely they meant.
In my hometown there used to be at least 2 shops (yes, shops) that sold bootlegged/pirate software. Mostly games but they had all sorts of business software as well. This was earlier than the 90s.
The shops themselves were not in the software business. One of them was specialised in turntable needles, and it was pretty popular. You had to go to the counter and specifically ask for "the menu" in order to access the "other side" of the business. It was an open secret though, as there was a lot of traffic in the shop for "the menu". You'd choose what you wanted, paid for your copy and leave with a bunch of floppy disks with it. They charged extra for the actual disks but you could also bring your own and only pay for the service.
If you mean electronic music bootlegs, then I don't see why the media or the format is that relevant. It's still just regular bootleg, and it's been popular since whenever copying and selling music was made possible.
> Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world,
Live sports piracy has the unusual property that you have to be able to get the block in place within the ~90 minutes of a football match, even at weekends and across time zones. Otherwise there’s no point.
If the courts let Cloudflare slow roll this, at the legal system’s normal snail-like pace, the law would be effectively useless.
How are streaming sites registering new domains and getting the site info out to the audience in that time frame? I suspect they're not and there's actually a period there's a window of weeks or longer for enforcement actions to be taken.
Users visit aggregator sites which don’t host the streams, they just link to them.
Then the streams are on sites with names like fins38gy2m.ws a new URL for every game.
The hosts of the streams can set up an URL days in advance, and post it to the aggregators at the start of the game.
Preregister domain names, distribute then via chat apps like signal or whatsapp or telegram.
Whatsapp has mechanisms to prevent this kind of thing by blocking the messages from being sent, but I guess I'm confused about how this works financially. Sports streaming (especially something like La Liga) is the textbook example of a mass market product. The vast majority of the audience isn't technically sophisticated, and live streaming infrastructure is expensive. Pirate sites need a reasonably large audience to make money. I find it hard to believe that there's enough reach for people waiting to click on random links in private signal chats to make pirate streaming a viable business when people can just go to a bar or a friend's house. Is that really happening at any meaningful scale?
> Is that really happening at any meaningful scale?
Anecdotally: oh yes. I don’t know anybody who pays, although that may say more about the populations I work with and hang out with.
I hear there’s plenty of headroom for the direct economics to work, if you’re reselling for less than the ~EUR100/month range the commercial providers charge [1]. Gross median income in Spain is on the order of EUR27000 annually, for reference [2]—so I’m not sure how many of the pirate viewers would be able to afford the legit product if the pirate channels dried up.
I also hear [0] there’s a robust side trade in exploiting pirate viewers’ machines though malware-style techniques while they’re there and feeling enticed to click yes to things…
[0] https://www.webroot.com/blog/2021/05/12/we-explored-the-dang...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LaLiga/comments/1fksf3i/how_much_do...
[2] https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadist...
That price point is insane. How could it ever rise to such a level that it prices out almost the entire audience of potentially casual subscribers?
Streaming services bid on the licenses and spent so much investor money that they have to charge this much and still not make a profit.
I've seen these sites run ads, so I assume that means that they do have significant reach and further the ad providers get some return on their investment.
Note that the ads were for things like VPN providers and pirate IPTV feed services, which people are willing to pay for.
> Whatsapp has mechanisms to prevent this kind of thing by blocking the messages from being sent
Sorry, you mean WhatsApp detects and prevents the sharing of piracy links? I wasn’t aware of this, good to know. Is there a source of the various checks they have like this?
You don't even need to distribute the URLs. An aggregator can use a DGA[0] in and automagically find the correct stream URLs. Unless the seed and specific DGA leak it would be difficult to get ahead of the pirate streams.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_generation_algorithm
A lot of them will share a link to a page of all the domains they operate. So you just bookmark the page and if the site goes down just busy that page for the new links.
Cloudflare presumably has an infrastructure to prevent abuse. Is it too slow to react?
I might be out of date but. I think the article is incorrect. It is the same corp that owns both the streaming rights and the ISPs. The court order allows those ISPs to block IP-addresses of sites that hosts illegal streaming. I find it hard to see how CF could have a case here.
There is a new factor in the equation: Rising anti-american sentiments. This ties in with point 5 especially. Forcing Spanish websites off Cloudflare could seem like an additional benefit.
I've heard enough of this anti-american talk, and it sure smells like propaganda.
The huge majority of europeans have nothing against the american people. Please, do not propagate these claims.
The “anti American sentiment” is overblown. Average person doesn’t care. I live in Spain and I’m not seeing much anti-American anything. Anti-Israel has reached hysterical levels on the other hand — at least in the media, though the average person really doesn’t care about that much either.
In my circles of high level Spanish/European motorcycle racing, we continue to have a very positive reception as Americans in the paddock. The (Spanish) TV announcers have been positive towards our riders, the teams and crew are positive and helpful. We have more people wanting to talk about Route 66 than trade policy. Most Spaniards I know tend to roll their eyes at their own government more than anything happening in the U.S. The only exceptions are hysterical US expats on Facebook groups acting like the sky is falling. But they do that reliably every time a Republican gets elected.
Anecdotes aren’t data of course, but vocal people online don’t represent broader thought.
>Spanish/European motorcycle racing
Yeah, you're in a bubble and you're likely misreading their politeness. I don't know any Spainards who would want to get into pointless political arguments with Americans who they guessed to be right of center in the off chance they were supporters of the current US government. Unless of course they were Vox affiliated, but even then I'm not sure they would bother engaging. They'd probably prefer to stick to talking about common interest stuff (like motoracing). "Anti-American sentiment" in the European context usually means being Anti-American government, not being dicks to individual Americans. The few cases where it actually crosses into Anti-Americanism the way you describe it seems to happen when the US militarily attacks a country they consider to be "brothers" or very close to. One example would be Greeks during the NATO bombing of now Serbia. Definitely one of the worst times to visit the Acropolis for an American.
I think your error is that you are gauging "Anti-American sentiment" by measuring how much you witness them bitching about Americans or Israelis. Whereas you should measure it by their actions. Tesla sales dropped signifcantly in Spain as it did in the rest of Europe. BYD sales are up 644%. See what they think about taking family vacations to the US.
Spanish people often end up buying local alternatives when available anyway but don't mind buying whatever when there are no alternatives (iphones, sneakers etc)
You ask the Spaniards if you want to send ammunitions to a country convicted of war crimes, the majority will most likely say no. And if your government is actually acting in accordance with that position and pushing the rest of Europe on that front, there's even less reason to bitch about Israelis to random foreigners.
> Most Spaniards I know tend to roll their eyes at their own government more than anything happening in the U.S.
This we can agree on. As it should be. Why bother with things out of your control?
I live in Spain and there is no rising anti-American anything. The average person doesn't care beyond the Trump hate that is spewed by the mass media, but the mass media spews hate about many things, so much that the average person can't really invest much energy into hating every little thing.
I know that people here would love to live in an alternate reality where everybody in the EU is fuming at the US having a right-wing government but that's not here at least yet. The US has done so many terrible things throughout history; they will survive this too.
> The US has done so many terrible things throughout history; they will survive this too.
They may never recover from decades of top secret intelligence being compromised.
> The US has done so many terrible things throughout history; they will survive this too.
Right, because extrapolation is famously applicable to human history.
Cloudflare becoming Too Big To Block. Sounds like it should become a utility.
This situation also applies to any hosting provider which doesn't give every website a separate IP address. (The newest versions of TLS encrypt domain names, so the ISP only sees the IP.)
Usually, they call that "nationalizing". For a worldwide company, would it be "globalizing"?
Why?
There's no rationale behind that.
When a thing or technology becomes so large and so relied upon that removal of that thing causes real physical harm to unrelated citizens or indeed the government itself, you should think about the risk and benefits of allowing that thing to be controlled entirely by a private entity with no oversight or responsibilities.
This is just barking up the wrong tree and it applies to everything that people use.
The root issue here is that La Liga is able to get a court to shut down a web host. It's shouldn't be anyone's problem but La Liga's that people pirate their stream, but a court let them make it everyone's problem. And there are any number of dumb things the court could have let them do, and turning CF into a utility company that can get shut down by the court doesn't solve the issue.
Finally, the main/original reason CF is useful is because the internet was created naively with no protections against bad actors. Weakening CF just empowers bad actors like LaLiga that much more at the expense of the rest of us. Being able to cloak my origin behind CF so that LaLiga or any other overpowered government or private entity doesn't know who I am is a feature. LaLiga having no option but to throw a tantrum that takes down half the internet is also a feature, and not one we should quickly hand away just because, idk, we can imagine some utopian vision where CF is unnecessary.
> This is just barking up the wrong tree and it applies to everything that people use.
You're missing the part where it's a single company, not just "the entire anti-DDoS infrastructure", that's being talked about here.
It would be perfectly possible (no idea how practical offhand) to have an entire ecosystem of competing CDNs all doing the same thing that Cloudflare does, rather than just Cloudflare making those decisions all by itself.
There is an ecosystem of competing CDNs. Blocking any one CDN necessarily impacts all the sites hosted on that CDN. This is a function of being a webhost with multiple customers not being Cloudflare specifically.
Except that the problem here is that Cloudflare, specifically, is so widespread that blocking it is highly likely to block many very important things.
If the ecosystem were truly more competitive, it would be much more likely that, for instance, if you went to block the CDN serving one particular football piracy group, it would not block half your government websites at the same time.
The EU should be sanctioning Spain the same way we're sanctioning Hungary for this sort of authoritarian behaviour. What's next, they're banning Google cause pirates use it to search for streams?
I don't know how this doesn't count as a net neutrality violation.
Look, I don't like these blocks, but comparing it to the situation in Hungary is hysterical and ignorant. And the EU going around sanctioning every member state at the drop of a hat if it does something the other member states don't like would mean the end of the EU, as support for this kind of EU is extremely thin.