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My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

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Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#131

Related (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect…

> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid. Applies to all venues and even…

is it different from turning on radio?

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#132
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar. This isn't how the energy market works.

Fair point, governments don't literally wire tax money straight to Qatar for oil. But whether it is at the pump or through subsidies, it is still ordinary people who end up carrying the cost — and that money gets recycled into football vanity projects.

I mean, if you're going to consider indirect transactions too, eventually every part of the economy ends up affecting every other part. That money that goes into those projects doesn't just vanish, it gets spent and flows back out into the economy.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers. In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a…

I don't believe that's what OP is asking, they mean to ask about the following scenario: 1. Someone sitting next to you in a bar is playing a match on their phone, but the bar is not. 2. Your phone has the app installed and hears the match. 3. La Liga sues the bar?

I doubt it. They’re not going to take a case to court for a single hit because it would be so easily dismissed.

They would have higher priority situations where dozens of phones hit at the same time in the same bar.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#134

Related (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect…

> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid. Applies to all venues and even…

On its own, nothing seems out of the ordinary. It's the extremes that La Liga takes to ensure they're getting that 200€/m that makes it insane.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#135

Related (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect…

> - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. This is common in Europe in general, also for copyrighted music. If your establishment wants to play recorded music, even just playing the radio or Spotify on the background, a copyright royalty fee has to be paid. Applies to all venues and even…

Do bars in the US just show matches on a residential cable tv connection?

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#137
post #92
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?

If you're a Cloudflare customer who suffers damages when LaLiga obtains a DNS block for Cloudflare IPs used for pirate streams, you'll have better chances suing Cloudflare for failing to provide the service you're paying them for (of course if you're on a free plan, you don't have much of a leg to stand on). One Cloudflare customer doing something illegal is only able to cause this much collateral damage because Clou…

I'm not an ardent defender of Cloudflare by any means, but there is no grounds to sue Cloudflare. Their service is up. Their IP ranges are getting blocked by residential ISPs. How would that be Cloudflare's fault?

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is.

The escape hatch with all personal data processing is "legitimate interest". Consent is a big part of it, but an industry with sufficiently deep legal pockets would likely go down the route of "legitimate interest" if cornered. I'm not a legal professional. I just work next to this stuff.

I think a lot would depend on whether they do any kind of on-device processing to determine whether the audio is likely to be a football match or not. I think they could successfully argue that data processed on your phone and not shared with them is processed by you, and then they could argue that the data that is shared falls under legitimate interests and would be proportionate, and pass a balancing test.

IANALEither

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is.

Are we sure ? I'm not disputing it, but is geo location alone as a data point covered GDPR ? I'll have to look that up, but as someone else said it's only enforced at EU member state level, however there is another central oversight to ensure it's enforced.

Not if you have no possible way to identify the person to whom it is related (this includes server logs etc). Theoretically, an event sent to a server with some GPS co-ordinates, with no metadata and no logs stored on the server at all could perhaps be found not to be personally identifiable.

This is almost certainly a thought experiment though, the amount of engineering effort required to ensure no logs of any kind could result in deriving the IP address of the user would be high, and they’re probably not doing it (even if they are actually not sending any identifying information directly).

You might also find that you have to take special care to avoid creating circumstances that allow inference of personal information. For example, sampling every night at 11pm, you’re very likely to be able to determine an address or approximate location of the subscribers home.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#140

Related (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect…

I would never agree to this. But it doesn't strike me as particularly unethical, either. So long as both parties understand what they're agreeing to, this seems perfectly fine. If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.

I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since one on of the main selling points for streaming is to not have to pay for a bundle of things you mostly don't want to be able to get the few things you do), but it assumes that people will never be traveling and unable to watch the games locally even if they do normally have access to it. My dad frequently travels for work, and he pays for the streaming service mostly to be able to watch Phillies games despite living in the Boston area, but the blackout rules mean that he can't even watch the Red Sox games with the streaming service if he's traveling outside of Boston. He also can't watch the Phillies games when they play the Red Sox in Boston, which is mostly fine, but it's still a little weird since he'll be have to watch the Red Sox broadcast (and therefore their commentators) rather than the Phillies one he's used to seeing for their games. The games that are given special slots on ESPN also tend to be blacked out for everyone, so that also causes issues for people wanting to stream them even if it's not a local game. The whole model seems to be more about trying to railroad people in paying for a less convenient, more expensive product even when they actively want to pay for something that's actually available but artificially limited. I don't get why anyone would be surprised that people just turn to "piracy" when things work like this.
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