The decision of the Commercial Court No. 8 of Barcelona caused shock waves in the Spanish Internet world; Suddenly, the possibility of receiving fines for watching pirated football on IPTV was very real, and all for a seemingly historic decision.
According to the first journalists who were able to see the car, the operators would be forced to identify users of pirate services; everything, so that rights holders can execute the corresponding requests, with consequences such as fines and direct complaints to users. An extreme which has already been raised at European level.
What is striking about this decision is that the weight of justice would fall, for the first time, on the users of pirate services. Until now, all Spanish laws (and therefore all judicial decisions) have focused their attention on pirate pages and broadcasts that operate without an official license; such as websites or servers that host pirated content.
Fines in Europe: here’s what we know
However, now that the car has been made public and experts have been able to analyze it, it is more obvious that this car will not have as big an impact as it seemed; It’s a victory for La Liga and other organizations, but This is not something that will “end piracy” nor will it affect the end user., at least for now. Everything indicates that we are faced with confusion caused by the words used by the first media who had access to the car; a confusion that some believe may have been intentional.
As you explained lawyer David Maeztu in X (Twitter), the resolution “is considered fatal”, and in reality, the real target of the car is not the end users, but those who share the pirated content. More specifically, the initial trial aimed tackle the problem of what is called “card sharing‘a common practice in which a legitimate customer of a payment service shares their connection with other users.
Map sharing allows hacker users to share a legitimate connection
He ‘card sharing” is one of the most difficult practices to implement, because some users who they really pay the official suppliers and obtain a decoder or real service access identifier; This access data is then redistributed across hacker networks to hacker users, either through set-top boxes configured to access the hacker network or through other methods. The modified decoders act as if they are legitimate, accessing the encoded signal from the servers; The original user can take advantage of this practice by charging a lower cost than the actual service to access the pirate network.
Hence the plaintiffs’ request to obtain the IP address and other data of the users of this pirate network: in order to define who is the hacker user and who offers this illegal service. In the words of David Maetzu, the order authorizes the “power to bind those who contract with legitimate service providers and then redistribute.”
That’s not to say the car isn’t controversial. The most complicated part will be precisely obtain users’ personal data that they are part of the pirate network; something for which it is necessary to overcome certain criteria imposed by the Court of Justice of the European Union. What is “strange,” according to Maetzu, is that the identity of the IP address with which the content was shared is granted, which is difficult without having a record of all connections made to the illegal service.
Can they fine me?
Therefore, no, users of pirated IPTV services will not be identified or punished, at least not as a direct result of this decision. Even this order may not be that important in the context of this lawsuit, given that this is only the “first phase” of the trial of these users who shared their access; not only operators could object to the communication of information necessary, but there would remain the question of legal proceedings and even the possibility of convicting someone.
For all this, David Maeztu’s conclusion is that the initial publication of the order was guided by LaLiga, and that the interpretation that allows the identification and sanction of end users is “biased and far from the content of the legal document.
