> 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?