The fight against IPTV piracy continues throughout Europe and in Europe, the first effects are already being felt, with the increasingly real possibility of fines only for watching pirated football and not for broadcasting it illegally. But this is not the only method used by rights holders to prevent their matches from being broadcast.
The simple blocking of web pages and servers, although a “traditional” method, remains the most used to combat pirated football; although in some countries it has become more widespread than in others.
In fact, there are still parts of the world where piracy is not as persecuted as in Europe, and Ecuador is a good example. La LigaPro, Ecuador’s professional football league, celebrated an event considered “historic” in the country.
IPTV blocking spreads
More precisely, it was Miguel Ángel Loor, president of LigaPro, who used his X (Twitter) account to announce the “imminent” blocking of websites broadcasting championship matches in an unauthorized manner. Specifically, Loor is referring to the order issued by the Telecommunications Regulatory and Control Agency, which orders the blocking of 22 domains allegedly used to illegally broadcast football.
Although blocking web pages is not something new in Ecuador, this is the first time LigaPro gets an urgent act to block pages which are specifically used to broadcast unlicensed matches. This court ruling requires the country’s operators to block server IP addresses, thereby preventing Ecuadorian users from accessing pirated services.
Those responsible for discovering these IP addresses were the LigaPro integrity department and the FEXLAW law firm. However, some of the IP addresses shown in the document published by Loor come from cloud-based services, such as those used by Cloudflare services. Blocking these IP addresses is problematic because they are shared by all services running on the same server cloud; In Italy, for example, a similar decision led to the blocking of innocent pages sharing the IP address with the pirate page.
Despite everything, this is a historic decision which will probably be the first in a long series, even if its effectiveness has not been fully demonstrated.
