Bad news for all those users who consume football pirated. An order from the Commercial Court number 8 of Barcelona gives the green light to be able to take legal measures directly against all those users who watch football through illegal pages.
The order will force Internet operators in Spain – Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, MásMovil and Digi – to inform the competent LaLiga authorities and to provide the data and information of all users who connect to the pirate football page servers. .
Among these data that operators will be obliged to provide is the IP assigned to the user, as well as the name, surname and identification number of the person who appears as the owner in the Internet access service contract; In addition, the address of the home where the line and billing is assigned must also be provided.
With this data, the relevant legal measures can be initiated for illegal consumption of football, another way to end piracy in Spain. This order is novel, because until now each regulation created by governments to block pirated content has only taken into account those who pirate said content, not those who consumed it.
Thus, consumer users become the target in the fight against piracy, after years of trying to put an end to web pages and servers specialized in offering content and access to pirated broadcasts.
An issue that has been worrying LaLiga for months, as Javier Tebas confirmed last September, confirming that they had eliminated 58 Android applications, which had had four million downloads worldwide, 800,000 in Spain. In the Apple environment, the numbers are similar, with more than 300,000.
“We are talking with Google and other platforms so that they can be located on those mobile phones,” explained the president of LaLiga. “If it can be done and it is done, for example, for crimes such as child pornography, for intellectual property, which is stealing, they would have to do it too.”
A step that represents a milestone for the fight in Spain against piracy, which is increasingly approaching the model established in Italy, where the measures range from fines that amount to up to 5,000 euros for those clients who consume pirated football; to criminal sanctions of three years in prison for those in charge of its distribution.
It should be noted that this new regulation is an order and not a sentence, so it could only be made effective if a judge expressly requests it. Digital operators cannot otherwise provide the personal data of their customers, according to the General Data Protection Law.
