Shazam-like technology used to identify bars illegally streaming soccer games

This is the service:

https://f1tv.formula1.com/en/

It's not available in every country and it's been comically bad so far. Most races the streaming just fails and when it's not failing it routinely drops down to an incredibly low resolution for a few seconds. The replays usually work once the race is over though.

This really doesn't sit well with me. Yes, the bars in question were breaking the law. However, keep in mind that one business was using private citizens to essentially spy on other businesses without the citizens' knowledge or consent.

I'm sure the users of the app technically gave legal consent via the app's terms of service. But I doubt even 1% of the app's users were actually aware of this aspect of the app.

Also, this is why the permissions an app requires to operate matter. I roll my eyes just as hard as the next person when I see comments in the Google's Play store about the absurd level of permissions required by some apps. But I also think twice when I install apps requiring ridiculous permissions compared with what they're supposed to do.

/s? Please?

I'm not saying think of the children. I'm not even making an arugment with that previous post - I'm probing your viewpoints to see if your worldview truly allows free sharing of information from one party to another as it appears you claimed.

I could have just as easily said terrorist propaganda, beheading videos, revenge porn, bomb making manuals, or a lot of other things. My point is to find out if you really believe in unrestrained speech, or if you yourself have limits to what is allowable free speech vs unallowable.

This has the same solution as any other story around copyright infringement.

If you provide people with easy, convenient, legal methods to consume the content in a way that works for them, for a price they find reasonable, then they overwhelmingly won't resort to illegal means.

I'm not saying these bars are correct to resort to illegal streaming, but a wise businessperson would see this as a signal that their product offering doesn't actually match demand, and work to fill that demand. You're not going to make 100% of people happy in 100% of cases, but you can get to a point where the level of illegal streaming just isn't worth cracking down on.

It's such a sad waste that all this money has been spent to identify and track down illegal activity when it could have been spent making the overall legal experience good enough that most people wouldn't need to resort to illegality. It adds insult to injury to note that companies like La Liga are already making money hand-over-fist; it's not like they have some sort of crisis where the lost revenue due to illegal streaming is posing an existential threat to their business. Instead of cracking down and making enemies, they could instead work to make the experience better and turn potential enemies into satisfied customers.