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Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

democrata.es

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Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#111
post #95
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said proactively?

Any action by cloudflare before a court order or notice would be proactive. There's no way to effectively block streamers of live shows because they can create new sites or accounts for each event and by the time they're found, reported and cloudflare reasonably reviews and acts on them the event will be long over. What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?

> or notice

Maybe I'm being optimistic but I'm assuming the first action wasn't large scale IP blocks. Cloudflare likely didn't take action.

> What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?

I'm sorry but I'm not buying that the market leader in bot detection can't detect sport suddenly being streamed to an influx of people from a new IP at kick off. If this was the US banning them, I'm sure they'd have found a way around it by now

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#112
post #95
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said proactively?

Any action by cloudflare before a court order or notice would be proactive. There's no way to effectively block streamers of live shows because they can create new sites or accounts for each event and by the time they're found, reported and cloudflare reasonably reviews and acts on them the event will be long over. What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?

A report content form, like DMCA, with support people behind processing the tickets. It already exists.

When there is phishing or pedo content, you think they wait for court order or react to abuse ?

They are distributing content through their servers, not just displaying it.

Every hosting and CDN companies has abuse department, it's a normal part of the process. Here, Cloudflare is aware, and chooses to ignore the abuse requests, then they have to take their responsibilities.

Cloudflare is a US-based company so they are realistically out of reach, or too late.

If there are abuse requests, and Cloudflare wants to comply but not block the website, they can downgrade to DNS only, and then the host IP would be blocked.

If Cloudflare doesn't comply and intentionally keeps distributing content -> block Cloudflare.

At some point for them, the cost of complying with the law will be cheaper than handling the complaints that they are blocked.

It's like YouTube, they shutdown content on request of rights holders.

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#113
Very ironically I get this error trying to read the article:

403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

Qui blockat blockodiodes? Cloudfare, it turns out....

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> went to the judges Which are part of the Spanish government.

> Which are part of the Spanish government. Judges in Spain are not part of the government ("Gobierno"). They are part of the Poder Judicial, the judiciary. The Spanish Constitution separates these clearly, give it a skim if you haven't already.

The judiciary is part of the government. Being an independent branch doesn't change that. Government doesn't just mean legislative.

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#115

Sorry. Why can't an indivudual bad actor site be targeted without affecting non bad actor sites? Why does the blocking have to be so broad?

Cloudflare don't want to lose the piracy stream sites as customers, so they can't throw them off their platform. They want to specifically block the stream sites and specifically only for Spanish visitors, so the only thing they can do is reject Spanish traffic for specific IP-ranges in their infrastructure. Result is a bunch of collateral damage.

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#116
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unreasonable to expect cloudflare etc to be able to proactively identify legal vs illegal streams. The companies who own the copyrights can't even get that right much less a third party that has no idea if a stream is licensed.

Why though? Why is it unreasonable to expect a company to have some level of responsibility for serving clients that are using their platform for illegal activity? It the same thing with social media and moderation. We don't have to let them off the hook just because doing the right thing would make them unprofitable.

I mean, how do we qualify which companies get punished for which crimes?

Do we punish gun manufacturers for someone being shot? Kitchen utensil companies for someone being stabbed? Car manufacturers for car crashes? Road construction companies for human trafficking?

How deep does this go? Is a steel foundry responsible for the stabbing? Is a camera lens manufacturer responsible for illegal porn?

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#117
post #94
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet. Cloudflare serves a whole bunch of legal and genuinely important services, and yet there was enough pressure to block them off.

…and that was already enough to get Congress to review the situation. The first paragraph in the article we are discussing says: > The complaints about the massive fall of web pages caused by LaLiga's fight against piracy reached Congress months ago. And the Chamber is now preparing to take measures. But even ignoring the fact that TFA directly disproves your and the GP's argument, the point you're making that "x got…

The Cloudflare block has been in effect since December 2024, so it's been in effect almost a year and a half, and Congress is at the "will act", not "has acted" stage.

And yes, of course you're right, that people have a pain threshold, but it's also true that people will normalise behaviour over time. I'm not saying further blockages will happen, just that I don't take it for granted that they won't.

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#118
post #50

One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle . If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tin…

I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.

But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#119
post #44
post #19

I'm torn on this. It always should have gone through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it. They were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them. I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that they don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as…

> the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between users and the servers providing pirated content. Cloudflare is just one step in the whole chain. Why not eg block Google Chrome? In any case, blocking Cloudflare was a stupid thing to do. Especially because it didn't anything to solve the actual problem.

> Why not eg block Google Chrome?

I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me).

They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?

Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either.

Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot.

Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.

Re: Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it look like if you sued La Liga for using their lawful blocking power in a way that injured you?

I don’t know that this would work that well given Spain is civil law, not common law

(Disclaimer: I don't know the first word about law)

But I have been thinking about this quite a lot recently (mostly because I get angry at the power states sometimes have over individuals). Would the distinction really matter in this case?. I would think that in a "civil law" contry things could be even worse for the aggressor

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