LaLiga “Talks to Google” About Deleting Piracy Apps From a Million Phones * TorrentFreak

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On Saturday, the head of LaLiga spoke about the piracy challenges faced by top-class Spanish football. Javier Tebas stated that in the first five days of the new season, LaLiga "eliminated" 58 pirated applications with more than one million downloads in Spain. He said that LaLiga is now talking to Google to "locate" the applications already downloaded on users' phones so that they can also be "removed": if it can be done with images of child abuse, it can also be done with the tools of piracy, Tebas claimed.

Yesterday an event organized by the Spanish football LaLiga took place at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Valencia.

LaLiga had the “Fight against Piracy in Sports Events” Victor Francos Diazthe newly appointed Secretary of State for Sports and president of the Higher Sports Council (CSD), and the MEP Iban García del Blanco.

Quoting data Recently published by the European Intellectual Property Office, which found that piracy in the EU grew by 3.3% in 2022, the CSD president said piracy remains a problem for sports groups like LaLiga and for governments across Europe. That report didn't actually contain any data on IPTV-based piracy affecting LaLiga, but there's no doubt that the league has its hands full.

Scale of the problem

LaLiga's efforts to contain piracy of IPTV services began eight years ago and according to local mediaLa Liga's anti-piracy department now detects more than 46,000 IP addresses worldwide streaming pirated live sports.

LaLiga boss Javier Tebas reported that during the first five days of the new Spanish football season, he had "removed" 58 pirated Android-based apps believed to have been downloaded by four million users worldwide. Tebas said 800,000 of those users are in Spain, where they use the app to watch pirated soccer streams.

The figures relating to Apple devices are lower, there are around one million users worldwide, 300,000 of them in Spain. In total, there are approximately 1.1 million users of these pirated applications in Spain, a considerable number but only part of the general picture.

Terminology and definitions are important

It is not clear what LaLiga means by “eliminated” and that in itself muddies the waters when trying to build a picture of achievements and failures. On the one hand, completely destroying 58 apps and their infrastructure would be a monumental achievement, but if 58 apps were simply removed from app stores or blocked by ISPs, any gains may have already been wiped out as hackers take over. adapted.

The telltale signs that “eliminated” means something more than total destruction were evident when Tebas described another problem facing LaLiga. While it may have restricted the availability of dozens of apps, LaLiga is in no position to do anything about copies that have already been downloaded and installed on users' phones.

Tebas describes this as another issue LaLiga has faced, which probably says a lot about the status of the “deleted” apps. If we assume that the “removed” non-functional hacking apps are useless and therefore of little concern to LaLiga, only the functional apps are problematic. If already downloaded apps can still rely on a functional Internet infrastructure, putting rebranded apps back on the market won't be a problem for pirates.

That said, Tebas believes that deleting downloaded applications has value and it seems that work is already being done in that direction.

LaLiga is “talking to Google”

"That is another of our fights: that those who have them downloaded on their mobile phones already have them and now we have to work to eliminate them," said Tebas, as aforementioned by local media.

“We are talking to Google and other platforms so that they can be located on those mobile phones. If it can be done and it is done, for example, for crimes such as child pornography, intellectual property, which is theft, they should have to do it too.”

It has been quite some time since intellectual property protection and child protection were mentioned in the same sentence, and even longer since anyone advocated for equivalent countermeasures.

That could mean that intellectual property protection is getting ahead of itself, but without equally enormous financial lobbying power, it is more likely to reflect that child protection is falling behind.