7 ms·

European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage

418 points by Brajeshwar 4mo ago

throwa356262 4mo ago
Such an obvious thing, should have been there from day 1. The situation in Spain is particularly crazy. How can la liga have this much power over the Internet?
- gonzalohm 4mo ago
  In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time. Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks. I hated that
  - dummydummy1234 4mo ago
    ... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)
    - forgotaccount3 4mo ago
      Sometimes places close streets for traffic control. The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones. A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.
      - cylemons 4mo ago
        Also the sideroads intersecting each other usually don't have traffic lights which is good for low traffic but bad for high traffic. What they would do in that case is close off one the roads so traffic flows smoothly through the other one
    - gonzalohm 4mo ago
      It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time. The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
      - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
        Bit of a catch 22 isn't it? Soccer is the only important sport so it gets all of the attention Soccer gets all of the attention so it stays the only important sport
      - wiether 4mo ago
        Having had this discussion many times, the conclusion we often come to is that part of the popular success of football is the scarcity and simplicity. In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years. When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix". If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events. Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event. They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football. They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers. You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it. To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity. Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup. In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.
        abdullahkhalids 4mo ago
        Most popular sports have world cups every four years. Basketball, cricket, rugby, volleyball, field hockey WCs are all held every four years. Some others like handball are held every two years. Cricket gets the same level of crazy support in South Asia as football does in most of the world. But the reason football gets such support in most of the world is simply because most people consider it the best sport, or the "beautiful game". It is one of the most well designed sports, having the fewest number of unnatural rules - only one in fact (offside). It can also be played with basically any number of players from 2-20 in fields of any size, so it's really popular for normal people. The skills floor is reasonably low, but the skill ceiling is very very high. So, then it flows naturally into social actions like blocking streets.
  - greenavocado 4mo ago
    > Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks. Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null
    - gonzalohm 4mo ago
      Those are my thoughts too. I believe there was a world cup or euro cup during the 2008 crisis, which Spain suffered specially badly. All countries were getting out of the "hole" except Spain, but hey we won the euro cup so suddenly our country was the best and everyone forgot about it
      - GuB-42 4mo ago
        Which I believe is a good thing. An economic crisis is tough, let people have some joy. I am not into spectator sports, and certainly not soccer, but the positives emotions that go with it are worth it, I think. If you think about it, how often do you hear good news? A war here, a disaster there, a mass murder,... And it is not because of the current world situation, it is always the case, we usually don't talk about things that go right. Go ahead, go to your favorite news website and see for yourself. Chances are that the only good news you see are sports related. The only other source of good news I can think of is science and technology with their new discoveries, but even there, plenty of bad news too, like with climate change and price hikes. Sports is the only consistent supplier of good news. Of course, sometimes, you lose, but losses are easy to forget, it is just another blip in the sea of bad news. But with all the sports that is happening, there is always something to make your day: your local team winning in a local tournament, there are even some losing matches you can be proud of.
        chuckadams 4mo ago
        Perhaps sports are a net benefit overall, but these are multi-billion-euro companies who don't deserve to keep getting handouts and special favors from the government to supply it.
  - FireBeyond 4mo ago
    > Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks. I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".
    - iso1631 4mo ago
      To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth* College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses. * There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth
      - FireBeyond 4mo ago
        > To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team There are - but popularity is vastly different. My understanding is that minor league baseball has a notable following, basketball is smaller but there are still some passionate fans, and that football is mostly "keeping players warm". There's also the "D1 College" as a "second division" of sorts.
    - stwr 4mo ago
      That’s crazy, in the Netherlands (though about 16x smaller than Texas) the 10 biggest stadiums in the country are Football (soccer) stadiums ranging from 10400 capacity at #10 to about 56000 capacity for the #1 stadium (build for 130 million euro). All at the highest paid level of professional football. 30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!
- gadrev 4mo ago
  It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible... We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/ https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.
- riffraff 4mo ago
  I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad. We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.
- microgpt 4mo ago
  Close ties to the mafia. Same in Italy.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
londons_explore 4mo ago
The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers... The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation.
bradley13 4mo ago
It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content. Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always. If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material. Too much work? Tough...
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  Isnt taking down illegal content censorship? If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal. I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.
  - qweqwe14 4mo ago
    How do you know if something is child porn?
    - nonethewiser 4mo ago
      I dont think it matters for the point im making. Child porn exists and should be censored. What are you suggesting?
      - qweqwe14 4mo ago
        It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"
        nonethewiser 4mo ago
        But my point is some censorship is good. Such as child porn. We can disagree on what constitutes child porn in practice but you arent saying nothing should be censored right? You do think there is such thing as child porn right? And that it should be censored? Im not claiming more censorship is better. So I agree it could be overapplied. Im saying some censorship is clearly good.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
expo98 4mo ago
I hope so, in Spain you can't access anything that uses Cloudflare, even docker images, thanks to LaLiga's president bullshit
- microgpt 4mo ago
  It's also due to Cloudflare intentionally not policing its customers even a little bit, but i still side with CF - they're the less bad guys.
  - tialaramex 4mo ago
    I think for Cloudflare it's both an obvious slippery slope - like, this isn't one of those dubious analogies where there seems to be an obvious bright line and the slippery slope argument seems far-fetched, the incredulity of non-soccer fans when the Spain situation is explained tells you everything you need to know. And it's just technically much easier to not do this. If you do this, and somebody else doesn't they're undercutting you. The "bad guys" want that uninfringed service of course - but so does everybody else because it's cheaper. I'd be interested to know, obviously people love football - the sport, the players, the teams at least in the abstract - but, La Liga itself, is this considered like holy the way football is, is it a slightly bureaucratic organisation that isn't as much respected and so if they start coming for individual fans it won't go so well, or are we talking almost FIFA-levels of "These are corrupt people, money vampires who drain €€€€ from our beautiful sport, I hope they all burn in hell" ???
    - tancop 4mo ago
      > La Liga itself, is this considered like holy the way football is definitely not. for most fans its someone who takes sides against their team and makes a lot of controversial calls when its comes to issuing fines and bans. there is corruption like the negreira affair but its not close to fifa level.
  - bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
    “Policing its customers” what do you want cloud-flair to do?
throwawayffffas 4mo ago
It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial. But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.
- btasker 4mo ago
  >they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial. Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff. The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin. Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed. The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this
  - tialaramex 4mo ago
    And importantly that rule meant that if your ISP doesn't have censorship filters, the anti-piracy people can't touch them. That's why Andrews and Arnold (aa.net.uk) is the way it is. After all, who can say how much AA should spend to stop their customers from committing crimes? Should they spend $100 per customer? $100 per week? $100 per day? How much extra money are you required to spend to stop other people committing crimes? For people with existing censorship capabilities the answer was oh that's basically free right? I mean you already have this capability so we'd just piggyback on that. But for AA it's an entirely open-ended question. If Hollywood wants to pay, let them propose how much they want to pay for this service. It's worth almost nothing to them, they know that, and so there won't be an offer.
    - someonebaggy 4mo ago
croes 4mo ago
Absolutely. No such power without consequences if abused. Put some skin in the game
mring33621 4mo ago
Agreed Enforcement should be a cost/benefit analysis. RN, there is very little cost imposed on the alleged rightsholders, so they spam freely.
zuzululu 4mo ago
the global trend is not good. in south korea the new law prevents anyone from posting memes of the president because they require public square operators to purchase AI hardware that is already expensive at inflated markup (with completely opaque RFP bidding process and no disclosure of beneficiaries) and every image and post be monitored for "fake news/disinformation" by a partisan government body created by the President. Bill C-22 in Canada, la Liga blocking cloudflare, UK requiring IDs....on an unrelated note Playstation store removing purchased games, zero day disclosures not being awarded so they end up in the black market leading to more data leaks.... this entire digital/internet industrial complex is beginning to show real issues. im hoping there is technology in the works that can give us back the old magic of the late 90s internet.
- microgpt 4mo ago
  Small networks maybe? Make a virtual network for you and some friends and don't let the public access it.
Arubis 4mo ago
This strikes me as the right move, but the timing isn't lost on me. Model training companies want easier access to data, and they have a lot of money and are growing their lobbying and political influence muscles. The culture of the people should belong to _the people_. Let's make sure this doesn't just turn into a transfer of which small subset manages to profit from it.
- braiamp 4mo ago
  The timing isn't lost on you, it's on the wrong galaxy. This is the regular requests for comments that the commission does on digital markets, the ISP's have been saying this since a while ago > In a new filing to the Commission’s ongoing assessment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, pointing out that the piracy blocking climate in some countries is getting more extreme. > > EuroISPA starts by explicitly referencing the Commission’s own conclusions. Its evaluation of the 2023 Recommendation on combating piracy of live events concluded that the measures had “limited positive effects” and did not lead to a substantial reduction in piracy. They are literally saying the commission that the law is being applied in a lopsided way and to start doing the counter-balance of that.
  - Arubis 4mo ago
    Hm. Am I understanding correctly that this is a repeated and periodic complaint, not a new thing being raised by ISPs? Most of my familiarity with ISP policies is from being stateside, where there's a large overlap in ownership between ISPs and media companies and predictable alignment in policies.
ekymz 4mo ago
Good job
matheusmoreira 4mo ago
Finally. "Rightsholders" have always been abusing the system, anything that applies a chilling effect on them is a good thing. But will it actually happen? Copyright monopolists always seem to get away with everything they do. I've kinda lost hope.
samgranieri 4mo ago
The sheer amount of internet disruption that goes on in Spain during soccer matches is just absolutely insane. People who pay for internet service and use it responsibly should not have their service disrupted by people pirating soccer matches. I can’t imagine the investors of the internet companies in Spain are happy about this either.
snapplebobapple 4mo ago
#metoo
6510 4mo ago
Here is a dumb idea, lets do innocent until proven guilty. If you don't dispute the claim the content is taken down. If you do dispute it it stays up until guilt is confirmed, then you get fined and the content is taken down.
kazinator 4mo ago
Why only rightsholders? Non-rightsholders who submit fraudulent claims also cause blocking damage; they should be accountable also (i.e. sitting in jail).

418 points by Brajeshwar 4mo ago

Such an obvious thing, should have been there from day 1. The situation in Spain is particularly crazy. How can la liga have this much power over the Internet?

gonzalohm 4mo ago
In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time. Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks. I hated that
- dummydummy1234 4mo ago
  ... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)
  - forgotaccount3 4mo ago
    Sometimes places close streets for traffic control. The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones. A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.
    - cylemons 4mo ago
      Also the sideroads intersecting each other usually don't have traffic lights which is good for low traffic but bad for high traffic. What they would do in that case is close off one the roads so traffic flows smoothly through the other one
  - gonzalohm 4mo ago
    It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time. The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
    - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      Bit of a catch 22 isn't it? Soccer is the only important sport so it gets all of the attention Soccer gets all of the attention so it stays the only important sport
    - wiether 4mo ago
      Having had this discussion many times, the conclusion we often come to is that part of the popular success of football is the scarcity and simplicity. In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years. When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix". If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events. Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event. They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football. They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers. You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it. To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity. Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup. In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.
      - abdullahkhalids 4mo ago
        Most popular sports have world cups every four years. Basketball, cricket, rugby, volleyball, field hockey WCs are all held every four years. Some others like handball are held every two years. Cricket gets the same level of crazy support in South Asia as football does in most of the world. But the reason football gets such support in most of the world is simply because most people consider it the best sport, or the "beautiful game". It is one of the most well designed sports, having the fewest number of unnatural rules - only one in fact (offside). It can also be played with basically any number of players from 2-20 in fields of any size, so it's really popular for normal people. The skills floor is reasonably low, but the skill ceiling is very very high. So, then it flows naturally into social actions like blocking streets.
- greenavocado 4mo ago
  > Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks. Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null
  - gonzalohm 4mo ago
    Those are my thoughts too. I believe there was a world cup or euro cup during the 2008 crisis, which Spain suffered specially badly. All countries were getting out of the "hole" except Spain, but hey we won the euro cup so suddenly our country was the best and everyone forgot about it
    - GuB-42 4mo ago
      Which I believe is a good thing. An economic crisis is tough, let people have some joy. I am not into spectator sports, and certainly not soccer, but the positives emotions that go with it are worth it, I think. If you think about it, how often do you hear good news? A war here, a disaster there, a mass murder,... And it is not because of the current world situation, it is always the case, we usually don't talk about things that go right. Go ahead, go to your favorite news website and see for yourself. Chances are that the only good news you see are sports related. The only other source of good news I can think of is science and technology with their new discoveries, but even there, plenty of bad news too, like with climate change and price hikes. Sports is the only consistent supplier of good news. Of course, sometimes, you lose, but losses are easy to forget, it is just another blip in the sea of bad news. But with all the sports that is happening, there is always something to make your day: your local team winning in a local tournament, there are even some losing matches you can be proud of.
      - chuckadams 4mo ago
        Perhaps sports are a net benefit overall, but these are multi-billion-euro companies who don't deserve to keep getting handouts and special favors from the government to supply it.
- FireBeyond 4mo ago
  > Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks. I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".
  - iso1631 4mo ago
    To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth* College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses. * There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth
    - FireBeyond 4mo ago
      > To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team There are - but popularity is vastly different. My understanding is that minor league baseball has a notable following, basketball is smaller but there are still some passionate fans, and that football is mostly "keeping players warm". There's also the "D1 College" as a "second division" of sorts.
  - stwr 4mo ago
    That’s crazy, in the Netherlands (though about 16x smaller than Texas) the 10 biggest stadiums in the country are Football (soccer) stadiums ranging from 10400 capacity at #10 to about 56000 capacity for the #1 stadium (build for 130 million euro). All at the highest paid level of professional football. 30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!
gadrev 4mo ago
It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible... We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/ https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.
riffraff 4mo ago
I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad. We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.
microgpt 4mo ago
Close ties to the mafia. Same in Italy.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

londons_explore 4mo ago

The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers... The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation.

bradley13 4mo ago

It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content. Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always. If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material. Too much work? Tough...

nonethewiser 4mo ago
Isnt taking down illegal content censorship? If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal. I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.
- qweqwe14 4mo ago
  How do you know if something is child porn?
  - nonethewiser 4mo ago
    I dont think it matters for the point im making. Child porn exists and should be censored. What are you suggesting?
    - qweqwe14 4mo ago
      It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"
      - nonethewiser 4mo ago
        But my point is some censorship is good. Such as child porn. We can disagree on what constitutes child porn in practice but you arent saying nothing should be censored right? You do think there is such thing as child porn right? And that it should be censored? Im not claiming more censorship is better. So I agree it could be overapplied. Im saying some censorship is clearly good.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

expo98 4mo ago

I hope so, in Spain you can't access anything that uses Cloudflare, even docker images, thanks to LaLiga's president bullshit

microgpt 4mo ago
It's also due to Cloudflare intentionally not policing its customers even a little bit, but i still side with CF - they're the less bad guys.
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  I think for Cloudflare it's both an obvious slippery slope - like, this isn't one of those dubious analogies where there seems to be an obvious bright line and the slippery slope argument seems far-fetched, the incredulity of non-soccer fans when the Spain situation is explained tells you everything you need to know. And it's just technically much easier to not do this. If you do this, and somebody else doesn't they're undercutting you. The "bad guys" want that uninfringed service of course - but so does everybody else because it's cheaper. I'd be interested to know, obviously people love football - the sport, the players, the teams at least in the abstract - but, La Liga itself, is this considered like holy the way football is, is it a slightly bureaucratic organisation that isn't as much respected and so if they start coming for individual fans it won't go so well, or are we talking almost FIFA-levels of "These are corrupt people, money vampires who drain €€€€ from our beautiful sport, I hope they all burn in hell" ???
  - tancop 4mo ago
    > La Liga itself, is this considered like holy the way football is definitely not. for most fans its someone who takes sides against their team and makes a lot of controversial calls when its comes to issuing fines and bans. there is corruption like the negreira affair but its not close to fifa level.
- bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
  “Policing its customers” what do you want cloud-flair to do?

throwawayffffas 4mo ago

It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial. But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.

btasker 4mo ago
>they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial. Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff. The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin. Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed. The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  And importantly that rule meant that if your ISP doesn't have censorship filters, the anti-piracy people can't touch them. That's why Andrews and Arnold (aa.net.uk) is the way it is. After all, who can say how much AA should spend to stop their customers from committing crimes? Should they spend $100 per customer? $100 per week? $100 per day? How much extra money are you required to spend to stop other people committing crimes? For people with existing censorship capabilities the answer was oh that's basically free right? I mean you already have this capability so we'd just piggyback on that. But for AA it's an entirely open-ended question. If Hollywood wants to pay, let them propose how much they want to pay for this service. It's worth almost nothing to them, they know that, and so there won't be an offer.
  - someonebaggy 4mo ago

croes 4mo ago

Absolutely. No such power without consequences if abused. Put some skin in the game

mring33621 4mo ago

Agreed Enforcement should be a cost/benefit analysis. RN, there is very little cost imposed on the alleged rightsholders, so they spam freely.

zuzululu 4mo ago

the global trend is not good. in south korea the new law prevents anyone from posting memes of the president because they require public square operators to purchase AI hardware that is already expensive at inflated markup (with completely opaque RFP bidding process and no disclosure of beneficiaries) and every image and post be monitored for "fake news/disinformation" by a partisan government body created by the President. Bill C-22 in Canada, la Liga blocking cloudflare, UK requiring IDs....on an unrelated note Playstation store removing purchased games, zero day disclosures not being awarded so they end up in the black market leading to more data leaks.... this entire digital/internet industrial complex is beginning to show real issues. im hoping there is technology in the works that can give us back the old magic of the late 90s internet.

microgpt 4mo ago
Small networks maybe? Make a virtual network for you and some friends and don't let the public access it.

Arubis 4mo ago

This strikes me as the right move, but the timing isn't lost on me. Model training companies want easier access to data, and they have a lot of money and are growing their lobbying and political influence muscles. The culture of the people should belong to _the people_. Let's make sure this doesn't just turn into a transfer of which small subset manages to profit from it.

braiamp 4mo ago
The timing isn't lost on you, it's on the wrong galaxy. This is the regular requests for comments that the commission does on digital markets, the ISP's have been saying this since a while ago > In a new filing to the Commission’s ongoing assessment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, pointing out that the piracy blocking climate in some countries is getting more extreme. > > EuroISPA starts by explicitly referencing the Commission’s own conclusions. Its evaluation of the 2023 Recommendation on combating piracy of live events concluded that the measures had “limited positive effects” and did not lead to a substantial reduction in piracy. They are literally saying the commission that the law is being applied in a lopsided way and to start doing the counter-balance of that.
- Arubis 4mo ago
  Hm. Am I understanding correctly that this is a repeated and periodic complaint, not a new thing being raised by ISPs? Most of my familiarity with ISP policies is from being stateside, where there's a large overlap in ownership between ISPs and media companies and predictable alignment in policies.

ekymz 4mo ago

Good job

matheusmoreira 4mo ago

Finally. "Rightsholders" have always been abusing the system, anything that applies a chilling effect on them is a good thing. But will it actually happen? Copyright monopolists always seem to get away with everything they do. I've kinda lost hope.

samgranieri 4mo ago

The sheer amount of internet disruption that goes on in Spain during soccer matches is just absolutely insane. People who pay for internet service and use it responsibly should not have their service disrupted by people pirating soccer matches. I can’t imagine the investors of the internet companies in Spain are happy about this either.

snapplebobapple 4mo ago

#metoo

6510 4mo ago

Here is a dumb idea, lets do innocent until proven guilty. If you don't dispute the claim the content is taken down. If you do dispute it it stays up until guilt is confirmed, then you get fined and the content is taken down.

kazinator 4mo ago

Why only rightsholders? Non-rightsholders who submit fraudulent claims also cause blocking damage; they should be accountable also (i.e. sitting in jail).