Europe has already launched the fight against IPTV piracy, threatening fines or arrests for distributing IPTV devices modified to watch football without paying. These are measures directly inspired by Italy, which last year presented the largest anti-piracy project on the Internet in the European Union, Piracy Shield.
Even though Piracy Shield has not proven to be the panacea promised at the time, and has even resulted in the closure of innocent pages, it remains the pride of AGCOM, Italy’s top telecommunications regulator. Under the umbrella of the Piracy Shield are measures such as: Block broadcasts in just 30 minutesoperators being forced to cut off access on the direct order of the rights holders and without judicial authorization.
However, Piracy Shield’s weaknesses were evident from the very beginning. For example, one of the most controversial measures, fines for watching IPTV, has not yet been finalized. But most importantly, it is clear that the law has not taken into account how modern pages work, something that services like Google and Cloudflare have highlighted.
Now, these two companies will have to appear before the AGCOM and explain why, in the words of the regulator, They are not doing enough to combat piracy. A meeting that takes place in a somewhat complicated context, since Google is the subject of an investigation for monopoly in Italy, and given that it has already been convicted in the United States for the same thing, the result could be identical.
With this weapon, the Italian half The Republic revealed that AGCOM wants to force Google to implement more measures against IPTV, such as a complete limitation of these services in search. However, TorrentFreak Let us recall that the United Kingdom has already imposed a similar measure, but has not managed to reduce the level of piracy. Indeed, new pirate services no longer obtain users via Google search, but via word of mouth and social networks.
But that may not matter to AGCOM, which has had Google in its sights for some time. When it became clear that Piracy Shield was not producing the desired results, the regulator accused Google of aiding pirates by offering an app on the Play Store that supposedly offered IPTV content. However, it was later revealed that the app had not been flagged by the rights holders.
For Cloudflare, the encounter could also have difficult consequences. The service has been affected by Piracy Shield because of the way it works: instead of offering a different IP address for each web page or service, it uses a “cloud” that manages multiple services at once. As a result, when Piracy Shield blocks a pirate service, Other completely innocent people are also blocked.
Cloudflare already has a reporting system in place, and rights holders only need to file a complaint and the company will remove only the pirated service. But this doesn’t fit with AGCOM’s vision with Piracy Shield, and the regulator could require Cloudflare to join the system.
