Tomorrow, June 14, one of the biggest European football competitions begins, Euro 2024. This year’s edition is taking place in Germany, and it will be your national team that will kick off the competition with the first match against the Scottish team. This will be the time when millions of people will search the Internet for how to watch the European Cup; but if everything goes as UEFA wants, it won’t be able to find free pirate broadcasts.
Traditionally, the fight against piracy has been reactive; In other words, a copyright violation had to occur before the authorities could do anything. Methods have changed, with the Italian Piracy Shield system requiring illegal football broadcasts to be shut down just 30 minutes after being requested by rights holders. Fines for pirate IPTV users are also very tight. But it’s always the same: reacting to a breach.
The strategy adopted by UEFA and its partner “Friend MTS” for Euro 2024 is somewhat different: it is a proactive strategy, through which broadcasts are blocked before they even begin. To understand how this works, you have to keep in mind that UEFA is not the only organization that has been preparing for the event for months; Pirate groups have also invested a lot of time and money, anticipating the flow of users they will receive in the coming weeks.
Hackers know that many users will look for a way to watch games for free; and they also know that there is great competition between pirate groups to attract these users and generate revenue, either with subscriptions or with advertising. For that, many shows are already in progress“filling the gap” with pages dedicated to matches that won’t take place for a few days.
The Google search engine has already started recording these shows, and they are starting to appear in some searches. UEFA’s strategy is therefore logical: it focused on blocking access to these pages before they become popular and appear among the first search results when the day of each match arrives.
As revealed TorrentFreakUEFA has already called for the elimination of thousands of pirate streaming pages UEFA matches; and Google accepted these requests and removed the pages from its results. As Google is the main source of traffic for all web pages (legal and illegal), this is a big blow for these pages, which will have a hard time attracting users and will have to use other methods such as groups in the messaging apps, social networks or word of mouth
What is interesting about this case is that Google blocks access to the pages, even though they have not technically violated UEFA’s rights; They only announced that they were going to rape them. On the other hand, Google refused to massively block pages that do not offer distribution but provide access to other pages that do; However, this did not prevent certain “collateral damage”, such as pages displaying only match results and not their content, which were also blocked.
