Spanish football league LaLiga says it has taken legal action against Google over the piracy of its media rights, accusing the tech giant of cooperating with and profiting from crime.
LaLiga president Javier Tebas said Google housed urls and apps which offer pirated broadcasts of its matches and allowed criminals to make money from the illegal trade.
“We have to say this very clearly: they are cooperating with these criminals, they are committing criminal acts,” said Tebas.
“Google gets money from the advertising and then also from the pirate entrepreneur, so it’s like money laundering through their account.
“Already in some countries we have gone to the courts and we have reported them for money laundering. In Spain, Google has been taken to court because they were a collaborator of the crime and they also benefited from the piracy.
“We are going to go right to the end with Google. We have had lots of meetings with Google related to this subject and they just ignore us.”
LaLiga’s media rights are worth €2bn (£1.65bn) a year, and Tebas believes Big Tech could stop 80 per cent of the piracy that currently damages the value of the rights.
“The real problem is for the rights holder – the Premier League, LaLiga or the NBA – because if people can watch them free or cheaper it will affect the value of the broadcasting rights,” he told the FT Business of Football conference. “What worries me is that when our contracts come to an end the value will go down.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time and been members of all associations and lobbies on piracy all over the world, and they’ve been useless because piracy is even higher than it was.”
Cloudflare sues LaLiga over piracy dispute
Tebas also pointed the finger at US cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, with whom LaLiga has a long-running dispute over the league’s attempts to prevent piracy.
“Cloudflare, everyone in the world works with them. They protect from hacking attacks on companies. It’s like a digital shield for legal IPs,” he said.
“But they are being used to protect illegal IPs. We blocked quite a few Cloudflare IP addresses. Behind them weren’t just Spanish football, there was pornography, child pornography.
“Nobody dares to talk out against Cloudflare or Google but I’m going to continue to. These tech companies do not behave correctly.”
Cloudflare said LaLiga’s blocking of its IP addresses “pose a clear threat to the open internet” and that it had filed legal action to have them ruled unlawful.
“In recent weeks, LaLiga and Spanish ISPs have made misguided efforts to address illegal streaming allegedly based on a recently issued court order to block shared IP addresses of Cloudflare and other cloud providers, a blunt and ineffective approach that has blocked millions of users from accessing thousands of unrelated websites,” a spokesperson said.
“Cloudflare regularly works collaboratively with rights holders to help address problems like illegal streaming, but LaLiga has left Cloudflare no other option than to pursue this legal action.
“Instead of addressing Spanish users’ concerns about excessive content blocking, LaLiga has attempted to deflect with baseless claims against Cloudflare while doubling down on its unlawful blocking practices.
“Cloudflare hopes this legal action helps prevent future indiscriminate blocking measures and makes it clear that rightsholders cannot prioritize their commercial interests over the fundamental right of millions of consumers to access the open internet.”
It comes after Sky accused Amazon of not doing enough to prevent the pirating of its sports rights, which include Premier League football, via “jailbroken” Fire Sticks.