Right now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.
Even some online games on Steam stop working. I've seen also a several Twitch streamers who can't stream, startups down, etc.
We're basically hostages of this stupidity. And you know the funny thing? Football streams are working just fine. Now I feel morally obligated to watch pirated football and never pay them for it.
There's one recourse in the Constitutional Court driven by Clouflare and RootedCON but the thing about the Constitutional Court is that it can be very slow and it's heavily politicized and I'm not really sure the government position on this. Right now, only one leftist Catalan party has said anything against the blocks in the Congress. Also many mass media are not reporting this issues because they're also an interested party.
So many people may not realize that this sort of thing has happened and does happen in the US.
Some may not know how large ISPs connect to each other. If you're sufficiently large, you basically get to peer for "free". There are common peering points where most of this happens. Now, how does traffic travel between ISPs? WWell, routing protocols (notably BGP4) dictate how these connetions are used.
Thing is, providers can directly and indirectly throttle traffic with all this. A famous example is where several US ISPs, notably Verizon FiOS (from my own experience) to Netflix. There was a time about a decade ago where in the evening you could get <500kbps and Netflix was unwatchable. Verizon alternated between denying it and saying it was a technical limitation.
But lo and behold if you just used a VPN to bypass Verizon's routing and peering Netflix was completely watchable.
Many believe (myself included) this was intentional to try and kill Netflix and prop up their declining cable TV business.
If the experience is everything is blocked or everything is captcha hell, the latter still sounds like an improvement. I personally have no need for a VPN so I don’t know what the internet is like with one, but it does sound like without one the internet is essentially blocked.
Football clubs have a billion eurodollar budget that they need to pay for. And how do they do that? With TV licensing.
I live in the Netherlands and everyone here has accepted that a Dutch club will never again get into a Championship League finale.
Every Dutch star is playing in Spain or England.
In 2019, LaLiga mobile app turned on the mic and location to track bars showing matches without a license [1]. Protection data agency fined them with 250k EUR, but was overturned by the Supreme court in 2024 [2].
It seems like the EU courts need to be involved in this case. Limiting internet to millions of people to make some people rich also flies too close to an human right violation in 2025 so maybe even ECHR can be involved.
They need to lecture these guys very seriously. La Liga is disrupting completely legit and business critical (probably in some cases safety critical) infrastructure, to.. combat piracy of entertainment content? The Spanish government is seemingly complicit. Feels like 2010 in some corrupt pseudo-democracy.
I'm from Spain, never watch football or pay any attention to it at all, and this year I noticed the day that the Liga started due to the internet suddenly working like crap. After various websites failing to respond I thought "I bet the football season has started again", I googled it and indeed, it started that day. I resubscribed to my VPN right there and then.
This situation (which has already been going on for a year or so) has made my attitude towards football change from "I don't like it, but live and let live" to outright hate.
I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
It’s the harmless version of “my tribe battles your tribe” for thousands of years, without the bloodshed. We’ve evolved to enjoy competition in general.
Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs.
My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing)
About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
It's one thing to know you don't enjoy it for yourself.
But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
I am in Spain (not spanish) and I find the obsession with watching sports very strange; in uk us au worse than here but here it indeed is bad. I do not like Musk anymore but did get starlink to not bother with this crap.
Come on.. anything of interest can be reduced to a few absurd actions absent of any context.
For example.
I don't understand how:
- moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal
- Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal
- Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
In many football stadiums throughout Spain, chants like "Vaya puta mierda de Liga" and "Corrupción en la Federación" are heard almost every game. It's not the whole of the football world that wants to censor the internet, it's the league and the interests of a few corporations (including, sadly, clubs).
Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. I know many people who used to pay for it; now most of them, including law-abiding citizens who wouldn't normally pirate, are learning how to do it.
> Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games.
It's not only become expensive, but they've also been split up by multiple providers. You want to watch the league games? That's one subscription. Champions League? That's another subscription. Chamipions League on a Tuesday? Need Prime for that. So, much like movie/series streaming has been split up between services, so have the football broadcasts. No wonder people are pirating the streams, when the availability is much better a fraction of the price.
Since LaLiga has no qualms with blocking Cloudflare IP's that could be used for emergency services. A cautionary tale:
In 2025, Optus suffered a network outage that prevented emergency calls (triple-0 in Australia) for nearly 14 hours. During this period, four people died, including an eight-week-old baby. The outage was reportedly caused by a botched firewall upgrade that affected up to 600 households in South Australia alone.
I live in Spain. The main problem is that your internet becomes patchy and things stop working for a few hours during the match. People notice the incident, but they don't understand what is happening, they just move on and come back few hours later for it to be resolved. Only some people understand the depth–usually tech people like us that get paged–and complain, and then the president from LaLiga call us a "bunch of freaks".
I have personally sent letters to everyone, including the court that ruled and allowed this whole mess. The judge in question must be either extremely incompetent or corrupted. The court response to this problem wasn't acknowledging it, but to double down, because it seems like some egos were hurt.
The only way I can imagine this situation stopping is by someone dying from a core healthcare system malfunctioning and a court case becoming viral. In the meantime, a single private institution can destroy the internet whenever they want, with full legal backup. Just insane.
It easier for me to watch La Liga in the US than it is for my brother in-law in Spain. Thank goodness we don’t have the reckless anti-piracy actions here but we do have some of the same BS going on because the same is true for him in reverse. Its easier and cheaper for him to watch the Red Sox in Spain than it is for me in Boston. 1yr of MLBtv is 30 bucks but local blackouts. 1 month of NESN the local broadcaster is the same price. Streaming all sports is a fragmented and extremely expensive mess for the fans and it only seems to be getting worse. I don’t blame people for cheating. Especially in Spain where incomes are significantly lower than the US.
iirc, part of the problem is that the main ISP (Movistar) is also a football rightholder (Movistar +). So they have decided that blocking cloudflare is profitable for them.
> I feel like affected ISPs and hosting services should identify LaLiga office IP ranges and block them during office hours.
Not just LaLiga, but pretty much any and all busineses and politicians in Spain. Bring the problem to all of Spain and let them figure out who screwed the pooch to end up with Spain back into the dark ages.
Why is there no responsibility for that? And not just LaLiga, but everywhere?
You can claim copyright on anything anywhere, things get taken down, zero responsibility if it was wrongful, be it laliga streams, be it youtube copyright strikes or whatever?
If there was a law, that if you took down something that you shouldn't have taken down (eg. hundreds of pages), you should be liable for all the damages and income loss for those pages. Same for youtube... copyright strike, proven fair use.. now pay for the lost income of the creator, the creator (webmaster, ...) did nothing wrong, you should be liable for that.
In representative democracies, the laws (on everything, but especially so on property rights) are what they are because the people who benefit from them also, for the most part, own the politicians.
I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast. They put it out there to reach a wide audience. Why can't I receive it and share it?
I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them. Why can't I do it with the digital variant?
Largely I feel like the response to this is a rephrasing of 'because no one will be able to monetize the creation of entertainment'. But that's not a moral reasoning, that's a choice of how to foster a market. Which undermines the explanation of this being about piracy. We can try other ways of growing a market that doesn't inhibit an intuitive natural urge to share.
You're right, I should have qualified that this is a limited use. But the limit is, in practice, quite fluid. They won't make a lawsuit over a slumber party. Probably not for a meetup. I expect they will for a theatre. Will they for a dive bar with a bunch of old CD's and DVD's? Or for a funeral?
The selective enforcement exposes to me that it doesn't really have a ethical leg to stand on.
The ability to do something and legality of it are mutually exclusive (ETA: oops, I mean independent of one another). OP appears to be making a moral argument anyway.
Regardless, no one will magically show up and break arbitrary cd player functionality like they are remotely disrupting Internet access if someone pirates la Liga.
Physical sharing is inherently limited. You can only share with some many friends, burn so many CD copies.
Purely digital files are so cheap to copy that cost is negligible.
Recreating “physical share” functionality in digital space takes work ($$) for $company and directly leads to less sales.
I think a good moral reasoning would be to think of it like ticket sales. You pay to get in. The event organizers take on risk and expense to run the show. Rebroadcasting is like sneaking people in.
Intellectual property should be abolished or greatly limited. It rarely serves its intended purpose (rewarding authors/creators) and instead creates rents and dangerous monopolies.
A related issue that suggests that the copyright system is broken is that it isn't equally enforced everywhere. The rest of the world freely copies books, drugs, and tech in any way they please, so all it does in the end is inflate prices for U.S. consumers, who effectively subsidize the rest of the world.
A few years ago, I checked how many subscriptions I had to get in order to watch all games of my club in the season (in France).
I was ridiculous : 2.5 providers for the league (Canal+ with their "sports" pack for some games + Bein Sport), RMC Sport for the euro cups, Eurosport for the French Cup, and Infosport+ (a Canal+ channel but not included in their sports pack, go figure), the total was close to 115€/month (that's close to a full month of salary at minimum wage). All with a 12-months subscription, even if the channel (like Eurosport or Infosport+) may not broadcast one single game of the team (related to cup draws).
20 years ago, you could watch ALL French football with only TF1/FR2/FR3 (free TV Channels) and Canal+ for €30/month.
When the LFP decided to split games to different broadcasters, everything started to go South. And this year, they couldn't find any broadcaster for the league, so they had to create their own channel, which can broadcast only 8 games per match day, since Bein still has a contract for the 9th one.
Why so? I dislike the "AI everywhere" fad, but it's hard to argue LLMs and AI in general aren't a form of technological progress. And generative AI happened partly because IP laws were basically disregarded.
Imagine if the MPAA/RIAA knew about this during the 2000's to use against the Kazaa, Limewire, etc during that era anywhere/everywhere. It is so overreaching the Internet would have been stalled at the time.
It is astonishing the court systems for those countries to allow this if, other than maybe football factors into their GDP (which says something about the nation, maybe they should find something more useful to produce). Just for some silly sports event watching man-children kicking balls around.
I grew up in the US as sports were just something on tv, but this is practically holding the nation hostage as though it were a religion, and the world should stop just so they can sell tickets for the only one god, theirs.
It really is incredible to believe that a sports organization has the power to shutdown what is essentially a utility without any oversight. It paints a very bad image of Spain in my mind. It makes one wonder how many more absurdities happen over there.
I ordered a new 4G router here, I've been having so many failed connections, now it all makes sense, in a non-sense kinda way. Anna also gone dark, just when I was traveling and missing a book.
As I understand it, the only organisation that can block the streaming websites without collateral damage is Cloudflare, and they have not chosen to do so.
The situation is a bit irregular, as the streaming providers set up a new website for each game, and the legal system isn't fast-moving enough to issue a court order banning a website within the 90 minutes of a football game. Instead La Liga got a 'dynamic blocking injunction' so they tell ISPs what to block, and ISPs have to block it.
That makes LaLiga look as if they were the victims, but they are not. They don't want to notify Cloudflare nor have done it any time since they started blocking it. LaLiga says that this blockings affects "hundreds" of people, and that they a rightful by doing that. Truth is, they are abusing their power and the spanish legal system to do whatever they want, as usual.
Cloudflare is not ignoring LaLiga and they are open to collaborate, but LaLiga refuses to do so, and are battling legally over it.
The next question is, why doesn't cloudfare cooperate instead of suffering disruption?
Or why doesn't laliga ask cloudfare to cooperate if that's the issue? Surely cloudfare could block their own users more effectively.
I imagined a solution where authorities would notify the hosting company of the IPs that are streaming. It should be obvious for the hosting company which customer is using these IPs for streaming illegal content just by studying the traffic pattern, no need to actually look inside the packets.
Then they can just ban this customer. That way the authorities will not have a reason to ban IP ranges affecting the other customers.
Please don't post lame comments like this on HN. F1 obviously requires an elite level of fitness, and exceptional physical and cognitive ability. It's fine to dislike it or to have concerns about the environmental impact, but sneering about its merits as a sport amounts to flamebait, which is against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45326345 and marked it off topic.
Why do they not pay for streams? Is this a “cable sub cost is too high” or a “broadcasters want to blackout stream so only locals and the right networks can see the game” situation?
EDIT:
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell [0]
The issue isn't "some people don't pay for sports streams". The issue is that some corporate fucktards have managed, through the power of lobbying, backroom deals and blatant corruption, to get an engine of country-wide internet censorship to be created - and then abused on their behalf.
This isn't the first, or the tenth, time it happens. People should have been sued, fired and jailed after the first time they blocked the entirety of Cloudflare for inane "copyright" reasons - and yet, nothing was done, and the censorship persists.
Perhaps take some of the emotion out of it? I’m asking for perspective and history on the issue, not clueless as to why the situation is bad. This is a US hosted forum, the issue is happening in Spain. Perhaps clarity is called for that’s not specified in the article?
At least here in italy, for some people it's just too expensive to care about paying, for some people it's just that they don't want to pay for it even on cheaper plans which were launched recently at a reasonable - well, more or less - price.
We have a similar anti piracy shield and once we got some Google cdn down for half an hour. Imagine not being able to use Google drive because the football league is trying to block football piracy streams - which are trivially searchable online anyway
In the Netherlands, live streaming of Premier League matches is done by Viaplay (I'm guessing in other countries too?). Their service is very spotty, lots of buffering, especially during highly dynamic (e.g. important) parts of the matches, and they stream at very very low bitrate, often dropping down to 360p.
As a result, people cancel their subscriptions. To recuperate some of the losses, Viaplay now licenses one match every weekend to a third party streaming service, this year it is on Amazon Prime.
So, now besides the high cost and shoddy service, you suddenly need an additional streaming subscription to be able to view every match. Granted, the streaming on Prime is excellent though.
This weekend, the Prime match was Liverpool v Everton, which as a Dutchie is the most interesting match of the weekend (given Liverpool's title win last season, the Dutch trainer and several outstanding Dutch players).
Several friends of mine who are into football immediately quit their Viaplay subscription, so who knows how many matches will not be streamable through Viaplay next season?
As a legit customer you are constantly chasing an ever shifting landscape of poor quality and overpriced services. Meanwhile with an IPTV subscription you pay little, get high quality streams and have access to _all_ content.
Football is just ridiculous in general. They sell off different parts of the competitions to different services so you need to subscribe to multiple companies to watch them all. It’s just tremendous corporate greed at the expense of fans. Players are being bought for hundreds of millions - that money is all coming from increasing subscription costs and rinsing fans around the world.
Basketball is another one where there is stupidity.
I live in what my TV provider called a "dead zone".
I live in the NBA's "broadcast zone" for the Portland Trail Blazers. That means even with League Pass, I cannot watch their home games, because I am meant to watch them on my local TV provider.
But guess what, I don't live in the Seattle TV zone. So I don't have a local/any station that broadcasts Blazers game.
And the NBA doesn't care either. "Sure, you can only watch half of your team games, sucks to be you."
If you want to watch all of your team's games you need to a) purchase an expensive monthly cable subscription from the company that holds the football rights. b) pay a sizeable sum on top, I think it's about 50 euros per month to be able to watch the actual matches.
This is just for La Liga games, you'll need to pay extra if your team plays in other competitions.
The main issue isn't that they're blocking the streams: it's that the blocks are so broad they're blocking huge swathes of other parts of the internet. Instead of blocking somepiratesite.futbol they're blocking Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS, etc
La liga wants to get rid of illegal streams so they can ask for more money for the licenses.
Paid Streaming or TV is quite expensive. It's mostly because you have to buy the whole package which includes everything else the company provides. Like Golf or Nascar or whatever they find on ESPN 8.
Also paying for a stream only really benefits the rich clubs. The money la liga earns for tv rights is split between professional teams with Barcelona and the two Madrids receiving about 30% of the money. The other 17 teams get the rest. Some fans don't want to see them getting more money (small percentage but never underestimate fans)
Sky in Germany was infamous for not providing nearly close to enough servers to support streaming of high profile games. And their cable TV box used extremely sub-par SoCs which made for an atrocious user experience.
In addition the cost only went upwards while the offering reduced every season as Dazn and other players entered the field. I said goodbye to soccer a few years prior to Covid.
The reason is relevant because I asked what the reason was. I asked this because I wanted to know how the people of Spain and Laliga got here, the history is relevant.
You may only want to focus on the rights violations but that doesn’t make the history and reasons irrelevant.
Is it a cultural thing? Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy. Certainly well into the 90s you could still buy pirated media, especially video games, from every mom and pop store.
I'm interested in hearing more about the evolution of copyright law wrt computer media in Spain. I see an article from 2001 describing how compiled software was not copyrightable in Spain at that time. [0] From [1] I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.
Having seen how Sweden changed their copyright law in response to the Pirate Bay website [2], I wish everyone knew that it wasn't always this way, and that states maintain their own rules. The idea that "no one shall copy any corporation's media, ever" is a recent propaganda success.
Man, Spanioards bought LEGAL ZX Spectrum games on book stores and such in the 80's as a solution for the rampant piracy. The companies themselves pushed down the prices for convenience.
Right now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.
Even some online games on Steam stop working. I've seen also a several Twitch streamers who can't stream, startups down, etc.
We're basically hostages of this stupidity. And you know the funny thing? Football streams are working just fine. Now I feel morally obligated to watch pirated football and never pay them for it.
They are stupid enough that they block almost no ipv6 range. So if your provider has ipv6, you're relatively safe.
Shhh. The lawyers barely know that ipv6 exists. They havent learned how to write out ipv6 addresses yet. Dont give them a reason to.
IPv6 is not widely deployed in Spain.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
So that is why I don't get disconnected!!!
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Why there is no counter legal action to sue them for wrong specification of the blockage? It seems quite an easy-win.
That’s insane. Do citizens not have a recourse? Like maybe a freedom of speech constitutional angle?
There's one recourse in the Constitutional Court driven by Clouflare and RootedCON but the thing about the Constitutional Court is that it can be very slow and it's heavily politicized and I'm not really sure the government position on this. Right now, only one leftist Catalan party has said anything against the blocks in the Congress. Also many mass media are not reporting this issues because they're also an interested party.
So many people may not realize that this sort of thing has happened and does happen in the US.
Some may not know how large ISPs connect to each other. If you're sufficiently large, you basically get to peer for "free". There are common peering points where most of this happens. Now, how does traffic travel between ISPs? WWell, routing protocols (notably BGP4) dictate how these connetions are used.
Thing is, providers can directly and indirectly throttle traffic with all this. A famous example is where several US ISPs, notably Verizon FiOS (from my own experience) to Netflix. There was a time about a decade ago where in the evening you could get <500kbps and Netflix was unwatchable. Verizon alternated between denying it and saying it was a technical limitation.
But lo and behold if you just used a VPN to bypass Verizon's routing and peering Netflix was completely watchable.
Many believe (myself included) this was intentional to try and kill Netflix and prop up their declining cable TV business.
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Freedom of speech, in the strong form that is most familiar in the US, is largely not a thing in other countries.
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We have the freedom to say we're against it. The system is rotten to the core and run by people detached from reality.
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but every time I use a vpn for non piracy stuff I’m captcha’d to hell. Is my experience somehow different from most?
The more widely used a VPN the more aggresively it's captcha’d, use a paid less known VPN and the experience improves dramatically
If the experience is everything is blocked or everything is captcha hell, the latter still sounds like an improvement. I personally have no need for a VPN so I don’t know what the internet is like with one, but it does sound like without one the internet is essentially blocked.
They could also make the sport more affordable to watch again.
Football clubs have a billion eurodollar budget that they need to pay for. And how do they do that? With TV licensing.
I live in the Netherlands and everyone here has accepted that a Dutch club will never again get into a Championship League finale. Every Dutch star is playing in Spain or England.
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Why would they ever do that now that they have a captive audience? More likely it goes the other direction.
> now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.
Weekends? Do they specifically block the internet (or at least the websites mentioned in the article - GitHub, etc.) on weekends?
Blocking Cloudflare seems insane. That's a huge portion of the internet (for better or worse).
The games are presumably on the weekend. This is abou blocking streaming of games that are currently happening.
Matches are on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Sometimes on Mondays.
So, yes.
Maybe that’s the point? So that you have to watch soccer on TV?
The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.
In 2019, LaLiga mobile app turned on the mic and location to track bars showing matches without a license [1]. Protection data agency fined them with 250k EUR, but was overturned by the Supreme court in 2024 [2].
[1]: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/12/inenglish/15603... [2]: https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2024-07-27/el-supremo...
It seems like the EU courts need to be involved in this case. Limiting internet to millions of people to make some people rich also flies too close to an human right violation in 2025 so maybe even ECHR can be involved.
They need to lecture these guys very seriously. La Liga is disrupting completely legit and business critical (probably in some cases safety critical) infrastructure, to.. combat piracy of entertainment content? The Spanish government is seemingly complicit. Feels like 2010 in some corrupt pseudo-democracy.
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The EU is about to put an end to E2E and scan our messages which is a far worse human right violation.
Right now the EU is for regulation and total control.
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Sounds like the ISP shouldn't be blocking hosting providers that are known to honor narrower takedown orders?
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Hard to imagine this being legal and the fine is a slap in the face of those whose privacy had been compromised.
This should pose as an existential threat to companies behaving like that.
I'm from Spain, never watch football or pay any attention to it at all, and this year I noticed the day that the Liga started due to the internet suddenly working like crap. After various websites failing to respond I thought "I bet the football season has started again", I googled it and indeed, it started that day. I resubscribed to my VPN right there and then.
This situation (which has already been going on for a year or so) has made my attitude towards football change from "I don't like it, but live and let live" to outright hate.
I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
It’s the harmless version of “my tribe battles your tribe” for thousands of years, without the bloodshed. We’ve evolved to enjoy competition in general.
Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs.
My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing)
About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
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It's one thing to know you don't enjoy it for yourself.
But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
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I used to think like you about sports. Until I started doing more sports, like bouldering (although at a pretty basic level).
I appreciate watching e.g bouldering competitions now simply because I can appreciate the difficulty more.
Had I stuck with playing football I imagine I would have had a similar experience now.
Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
Planning around rule interpretations is part of the strategy (if you’re good) (usually)
I am in Spain (not spanish) and I find the obsession with watching sports very strange; in uk us au worse than here but here it indeed is bad. I do not like Musk anymore but did get starlink to not bother with this crap.
It's a fun game
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Come on.. anything of interest can be reduced to a few absurd actions absent of any context.
For example. I don't understand how: - moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal - Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal - Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
Agreed. I don't particularly feel inclined to watch millionaires kick a ball around.
What irks me are the grown, drunk people that get infected with hatred towards the other team and its fans.
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It's (hopefully) unscripted drama. People enjoy drama.
Bread and circuses.
In many football stadiums throughout Spain, chants like "Vaya puta mierda de Liga" and "Corrupción en la Federación" are heard almost every game. It's not the whole of the football world that wants to censor the internet, it's the league and the interests of a few corporations (including, sadly, clubs).
Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. I know many people who used to pay for it; now most of them, including law-abiding citizens who wouldn't normally pirate, are learning how to do it.
> Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games.
It's not only become expensive, but they've also been split up by multiple providers. You want to watch the league games? That's one subscription. Champions League? That's another subscription. Chamipions League on a Tuesday? Need Prime for that. So, much like movie/series streaming has been split up between services, so have the football broadcasts. No wonder people are pirating the streams, when the availability is much better a fraction of the price.
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and sadly there is so much money involved in this sport now it dictates everything, it's a mafia
Since LaLiga has no qualms with blocking Cloudflare IP's that could be used for emergency services. A cautionary tale:
In 2025, Optus suffered a network outage that prevented emergency calls (triple-0 in Australia) for nearly 14 hours. During this period, four people died, including an eight-week-old baby. The outage was reportedly caused by a botched firewall upgrade that affected up to 600 households in South Australia alone.
https://7news.com.au/news/optus-deaths-firewall-upgrade-repo...
It seems "move fast and break things" has infected the telcos too.
In any case, depending on Cloudflare for emergency services seems an extraordinarily stupid idea.
‘Move slow and break things’ would be a more accurate description. These shortcomings aren’t about innovation, they’re about cost.
I live in Spain. The main problem is that your internet becomes patchy and things stop working for a few hours during the match. People notice the incident, but they don't understand what is happening, they just move on and come back few hours later for it to be resolved. Only some people understand the depth–usually tech people like us that get paged–and complain, and then the president from LaLiga call us a "bunch of freaks".
I have personally sent letters to everyone, including the court that ruled and allowed this whole mess. The judge in question must be either extremely incompetent or corrupted. The court response to this problem wasn't acknowledging it, but to double down, because it seems like some egos were hurt.
The only way I can imagine this situation stopping is by someone dying from a core healthcare system malfunctioning and a court case becoming viral. In the meantime, a single private institution can destroy the internet whenever they want, with full legal backup. Just insane.
It easier for me to watch La Liga in the US than it is for my brother in-law in Spain. Thank goodness we don’t have the reckless anti-piracy actions here but we do have some of the same BS going on because the same is true for him in reverse. Its easier and cheaper for him to watch the Red Sox in Spain than it is for me in Boston. 1yr of MLBtv is 30 bucks but local blackouts. 1 month of NESN the local broadcaster is the same price. Streaming all sports is a fragmented and extremely expensive mess for the fans and it only seems to be getting worse. I don’t blame people for cheating. Especially in Spain where incomes are significantly lower than the US.
UK has similar BS
> The "3pm blackout" rule prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays.
> The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force.
> The blackout comes into effect when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c98l671604vo
Sucks to have to spin up the VPN anytime there's a match. Wonder how much money are Spanish companies losing out on online sales over this crap.
Have this: https://hayahora.futbol/ on my bookmarks every time some site doesn't respond.
I feel like affected ISPs and hosting services should identify LaLiga office IP ranges and block them during office hours.
Or just feed them a never ending series of cloudflare turnstile captchas.
iirc, part of the problem is that the main ISP (Movistar) is also a football rightholder (Movistar +). So they have decided that blocking cloudflare is profitable for them.
Definitely part of the problem. A clear antitrust issue.
> I feel like affected ISPs and hosting services should identify LaLiga office IP ranges and block them during office hours.
Not just LaLiga, but pretty much any and all busineses and politicians in Spain. Bring the problem to all of Spain and let them figure out who screwed the pooch to end up with Spain back into the dark ages.
Of course, that will only work once.
Why is there no responsibility for that? And not just LaLiga, but everywhere?
You can claim copyright on anything anywhere, things get taken down, zero responsibility if it was wrongful, be it laliga streams, be it youtube copyright strikes or whatever?
If there was a law, that if you took down something that you shouldn't have taken down (eg. hundreds of pages), you should be liable for all the damages and income loss for those pages. Same for youtube... copyright strike, proven fair use.. now pay for the lost income of the creator, the creator (webmaster, ...) did nothing wrong, you should be liable for that.
In representative democracies, the laws (on everything, but especially so on property rights) are what they are because the people who benefit from them also, for the most part, own the politicians.
A few months ago I cancelled my subscription to watch LaLiga. I won't pay a single euro to these tyrants who impose censorship on innocent people.
This has been going on for years. A VPN is practically mandatory nowadays.
I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast. They put it out there to reach a wide audience. Why can't I receive it and share it?
I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them. Why can't I do it with the digital variant?
Largely I feel like the response to this is a rephrasing of 'because no one will be able to monetize the creation of entertainment'. But that's not a moral reasoning, that's a choice of how to foster a market. Which undermines the explanation of this being about piracy. We can try other ways of growing a market that doesn't inhibit an intuitive natural urge to share.
> I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast.
Copyright is based on economic cost/benefit, not natural rights.
> I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them
Wait, can you? In the US and EU, physical copies are for personal use only. Where are you that this would be legal?
You're right, I should have qualified that this is a limited use. But the limit is, in practice, quite fluid. They won't make a lawsuit over a slumber party. Probably not for a meetup. I expect they will for a theatre. Will they for a dive bar with a bunch of old CD's and DVD's? Or for a funeral?
The selective enforcement exposes to me that it doesn't really have a ethical leg to stand on.
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The ability to do something and legality of it are mutually exclusive (ETA: oops, I mean independent of one another). OP appears to be making a moral argument anyway.
Regardless, no one will magically show up and break arbitrary cd player functionality like they are remotely disrupting Internet access if someone pirates la Liga.
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Depends on the country, over here i can legally share it with friends and family. As in legally create a copy and gift it.
I can't mass print/burn/copy copyrighted works, but the key word here is 'mass'.
Physical sharing is inherently limited. You can only share with some many friends, burn so many CD copies.
Purely digital files are so cheap to copy that cost is negligible.
Recreating “physical share” functionality in digital space takes work ($$) for $company and directly leads to less sales.
I think a good moral reasoning would be to think of it like ticket sales. You pay to get in. The event organizers take on risk and expense to run the show. Rebroadcasting is like sneaking people in.
> I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them
But you can't buy them there.
Sure, you can buy them (cheaply) somewhere else and re-sell in the destination country, but you can't do it affordably at scale.
Last month I asked on HN what I can do to fight this as a non-EU citizen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44997883
Intellectual property should be abolished or greatly limited. It rarely serves its intended purpose (rewarding authors/creators) and instead creates rents and dangerous monopolies.
A related issue that suggests that the copyright system is broken is that it isn't equally enforced everywhere. The rest of the world freely copies books, drugs, and tech in any way they please, so all it does in the end is inflate prices for U.S. consumers, who effectively subsidize the rest of the world.
A few years ago, I checked how many subscriptions I had to get in order to watch all games of my club in the season (in France).
I was ridiculous : 2.5 providers for the league (Canal+ with their "sports" pack for some games + Bein Sport), RMC Sport for the euro cups, Eurosport for the French Cup, and Infosport+ (a Canal+ channel but not included in their sports pack, go figure), the total was close to 115€/month (that's close to a full month of salary at minimum wage). All with a 12-months subscription, even if the channel (like Eurosport or Infosport+) may not broadcast one single game of the team (related to cup draws).
20 years ago, you could watch ALL French football with only TF1/FR2/FR3 (free TV Channels) and Canal+ for €30/month.
When the LFP decided to split games to different broadcasters, everything started to go South. And this year, they couldn't find any broadcaster for the league, so they had to create their own channel, which can broadcast only 8 games per match day, since Bein still has a contract for the 9th one.
I felt generative AI has weakened the argument against intellectual property.
Why so? I dislike the "AI everywhere" fad, but it's hard to argue LLMs and AI in general aren't a form of technological progress. And generative AI happened partly because IP laws were basically disregarded.
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How this is even legal is beyond me.
Imagine if the MPAA/RIAA knew about this during the 2000's to use against the Kazaa, Limewire, etc during that era anywhere/everywhere. It is so overreaching the Internet would have been stalled at the time.
It is astonishing the court systems for those countries to allow this if, other than maybe football factors into their GDP (which says something about the nation, maybe they should find something more useful to produce). Just for some silly sports event watching man-children kicking balls around.
I grew up in the US as sports were just something on tv, but this is practically holding the nation hostage as though it were a religion, and the world should stop just so they can sell tickets for the only one god, theirs.
It really is incredible to believe that a sports organization has the power to shutdown what is essentially a utility without any oversight. It paints a very bad image of Spain in my mind. It makes one wonder how many more absurdities happen over there.
I ordered a new 4G router here, I've been having so many failed connections, now it all makes sense, in a non-sense kinda way. Anna also gone dark, just when I was traveling and missing a book.
If you get a non-Spanish EU SIM, it should route all your traffic through that other country, no?
Not sure if roaming always tunnels your traffic back to SIM’s country of origin or not.
I wasnt sure if 4G/mobile has the same 'open internet' rules that telcos usually have to follow for cabled connections.
But good idea using foreign SIM, although I'll probably need residential proof or probably have to give a blood sample at this rate.
In the overwhelming majority of cases. LBO (local break-out) apparently does exist, though I've never seen it personally.
I don’t think it does, at all.
I had to use i2pd plus some mirror to update my BSD systems...
Can the service providers somehow block illegal streaming themselves? That way no third party services would be affected?
As I understand it, the only organisation that can block the streaming websites without collateral damage is Cloudflare, and they have not chosen to do so.
The situation is a bit irregular, as the streaming providers set up a new website for each game, and the legal system isn't fast-moving enough to issue a court order banning a website within the 90 minutes of a football game. Instead La Liga got a 'dynamic blocking injunction' so they tell ISPs what to block, and ISPs have to block it.
That makes LaLiga look as if they were the victims, but they are not. They don't want to notify Cloudflare nor have done it any time since they started blocking it. LaLiga says that this blockings affects "hundreds" of people, and that they a rightful by doing that. Truth is, they are abusing their power and the spanish legal system to do whatever they want, as usual.
Cloudflare is not ignoring LaLiga and they are open to collaborate, but LaLiga refuses to do so, and are battling legally over it.
The next question is, why doesn't cloudfare cooperate instead of suffering disruption? Or why doesn't laliga ask cloudfare to cooperate if that's the issue? Surely cloudfare could block their own users more effectively.
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I imagined a solution where authorities would notify the hosting company of the IPs that are streaming. It should be obvious for the hosting company which customer is using these IPs for streaming illegal content just by studying the traffic pattern, no need to actually look inside the packets.
Then they can just ban this customer. That way the authorities will not have a reason to ban IP ranges affecting the other customers.
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This will soon be turned into a political weapon. You do what I want or I cut your internet.
If the service use cloud flare expect for trouble :(
i've been trying to understand what was making the CI fail for about 3h, until i realised it was this thanks to this post.
thanks. this sucks.
I just wanted to to enter https://www.osnews.com and it's blocked because of LaLiga. Infuriating...
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Please don't post lame comments like this on HN. F1 obviously requires an elite level of fitness, and exceptional physical and cognitive ability. It's fine to dislike it or to have concerns about the environmental impact, but sneering about its merits as a sport amounts to flamebait, which is against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45326345 and marked it off topic.
Why do they not pay for streams? Is this a “cable sub cost is too high” or a “broadcasters want to blackout stream so only locals and the right networks can see the game” situation?
EDIT: “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell [0]
[0] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...
It really doesn't matter.
The issue isn't "some people don't pay for sports streams". The issue is that some corporate fucktards have managed, through the power of lobbying, backroom deals and blatant corruption, to get an engine of country-wide internet censorship to be created - and then abused on their behalf.
This isn't the first, or the tenth, time it happens. People should have been sued, fired and jailed after the first time they blocked the entirety of Cloudflare for inane "copyright" reasons - and yet, nothing was done, and the censorship persists.
Perhaps take some of the emotion out of it? I’m asking for perspective and history on the issue, not clueless as to why the situation is bad. This is a US hosted forum, the issue is happening in Spain. Perhaps clarity is called for that’s not specified in the article?
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I can answer for Italy which has the same issue, and a similar "solution",and it's the first option.
Watching football has become really expensive in the last decade and people are fed up.
Also, sometimes you need different subscriptions to watch all the games of your team.
Meanwhile, piracy is cheap and convenient.
At least here in italy, for some people it's just too expensive to care about paying, for some people it's just that they don't want to pay for it even on cheaper plans which were launched recently at a reasonable - well, more or less - price.
We have a similar anti piracy shield and once we got some Google cdn down for half an hour. Imagine not being able to use Google drive because the football league is trying to block football piracy streams - which are trivially searchable online anyway
In the Netherlands, live streaming of Premier League matches is done by Viaplay (I'm guessing in other countries too?). Their service is very spotty, lots of buffering, especially during highly dynamic (e.g. important) parts of the matches, and they stream at very very low bitrate, often dropping down to 360p.
As a result, people cancel their subscriptions. To recuperate some of the losses, Viaplay now licenses one match every weekend to a third party streaming service, this year it is on Amazon Prime.
So, now besides the high cost and shoddy service, you suddenly need an additional streaming subscription to be able to view every match. Granted, the streaming on Prime is excellent though.
This weekend, the Prime match was Liverpool v Everton, which as a Dutchie is the most interesting match of the weekend (given Liverpool's title win last season, the Dutch trainer and several outstanding Dutch players).
Several friends of mine who are into football immediately quit their Viaplay subscription, so who knows how many matches will not be streamable through Viaplay next season?
As a legit customer you are constantly chasing an ever shifting landscape of poor quality and overpriced services. Meanwhile with an IPTV subscription you pay little, get high quality streams and have access to _all_ content.
Football is just ridiculous in general. They sell off different parts of the competitions to different services so you need to subscribe to multiple companies to watch them all. It’s just tremendous corporate greed at the expense of fans. Players are being bought for hundreds of millions - that money is all coming from increasing subscription costs and rinsing fans around the world.
Basketball is another one where there is stupidity.
I live in what my TV provider called a "dead zone".
I live in the NBA's "broadcast zone" for the Portland Trail Blazers. That means even with League Pass, I cannot watch their home games, because I am meant to watch them on my local TV provider.
But guess what, I don't live in the Seattle TV zone. So I don't have a local/any station that broadcasts Blazers game.
And the NBA doesn't care either. "Sure, you can only watch half of your team games, sucks to be you."
If you want to watch all of your team's games you need to a) purchase an expensive monthly cable subscription from the company that holds the football rights. b) pay a sizeable sum on top, I think it's about 50 euros per month to be able to watch the actual matches.
This is just for La Liga games, you'll need to pay extra if your team plays in other competitions.
For personal viewing. How much do bars pay?
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Rights holders can, at any time, make the distribution of games smooth and affordable.
Their choice to infinitely segment sports broadcast results in piracy.
The main issue isn't that they're blocking the streams: it's that the blocks are so broad they're blocking huge swathes of other parts of the internet. Instead of blocking somepiratesite.futbol they're blocking Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS, etc
La liga wants to get rid of illegal streams so they can ask for more money for the licenses.
Paid Streaming or TV is quite expensive. It's mostly because you have to buy the whole package which includes everything else the company provides. Like Golf or Nascar or whatever they find on ESPN 8.
Also paying for a stream only really benefits the rich clubs. The money la liga earns for tv rights is split between professional teams with Barcelona and the two Madrids receiving about 30% of the money. The other 17 teams get the rest. Some fans don't want to see them getting more money (small percentage but never underestimate fans)
Sky in Germany was infamous for not providing nearly close to enough servers to support streaming of high profile games. And their cable TV box used extremely sub-par SoCs which made for an atrocious user experience.
In addition the cost only went upwards while the offering reduced every season as Dazn and other players entered the field. I said goodbye to soccer a few years prior to Covid.
You can't imagine how much you have to pay in Spain for the right of seeing a single La Liga match.
Oh wait, you cannot do that. You have to pay for all the championship together with the Champions League and what not.
The reason is irrelevant. Only the private censorship perpertrated by the copyright industry matters.
The reason is relevant because I asked what the reason was. I asked this because I wanted to know how the people of Spain and Laliga got here, the history is relevant.
You may only want to focus on the rights violations but that doesn’t make the history and reasons irrelevant.
Is it a cultural thing? Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy. Certainly well into the 90s you could still buy pirated media, especially video games, from every mom and pop store.
I'm interested in hearing more about the evolution of copyright law wrt computer media in Spain. I see an article from 2001 describing how compiled software was not copyrightable in Spain at that time. [0] From [1] I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.
Having seen how Sweden changed their copyright law in response to the Pirate Bay website [2], I wish everyone knew that it wasn't always this way, and that states maintain their own rules. The idea that "no one shall copy any corporation's media, ever" is a recent propaganda success.
[0] https://www.mondaq.com/copyright/14472/technology-protection...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_file_sharing
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7978853.stm
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> Computers and copyright are fairly recent innovations in some parts of Europe such as Spain and Italy
LOL, what did you smoke, man?
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At least in italy is more of a "people with economic interest in football are also in politics and thus are able to shape policies for their profit"
Man, Spanioards bought LEGAL ZX Spectrum games on book stores and such in the 80's as a solution for the rampant piracy. The companies themselves pushed down the prices for convenience.
Fairly recent innovations? Lol.
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Computers and copyright are fairly recent in Spain and Italy? This is astonishingly ignorant, if not simple ragebait.
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