Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times | Hacker News Reader

Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

bandaancha.eu

446 pointsakyuu461 comments

Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.

The EU is more likely to enact more censorship than other way.

This. The chat control 2.0 law includes blocking orders. And Ursula von der Leyen tried to introduce internet censorship when she was still in German politics.

You’re forgetting the EU is composed of people elected and appointed by member countries. If you don’t like certain policies - contact your MEPs and express your views. Also go vote during your next election. It’s called a democracy for a reason.

I'm not forgetting that.

> and appointed by member countries [..] Also go vote during your next election

That's an important detail. I had no chance to vote against Zensursula.

That's oversimplification. EU is composed of people vetted by lobbyist/old money groups, elected and approved by member countries. Their primary allegiance is not to the voter.

You can't vote for the EU commission and the parliament has no power.

You don't have "your MEP" in most EU countries. They don't care about you because their loyalty is to the party, not the voter. They need to be with good standing with the party to even get on the list.

There are so many indirections in that "democracy" that it's no longer a democracy at all. You don't get to vote on issues, you don't get to vote on people (they are just a proxy for a party). You just get to vote on 2-3 reasonable parties (if even that). There is nothing you can do in that system about a specific issue.

Tried? She already did EU-wide with the RT ban. Doesn't matter what your opinion on russian state media is, the censorship regime is now in place and it's easy to expand. (Not to mention the EU describes itself as democratic yet has the need to censor)

Germans don't call her Cenzursula for nothing.

> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions

Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?

Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens.

It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.

That would be an absolute disaster and basically destroy European democracy.

The way this works best is that you have a federal system that sets out what the member states can't do (e.g. block internet, censor speech, ex post facto laws, trade barriers) and then the central government exists only to enforce those constraints on the member states, who choose whether and how to do any of the things they are allowed to do.

So Spanish people are too stupid to vote for their own policy preferences?

How do you know the EU is guaranteed to do a better job than national governments representing the desires of that nation’s citizens?

Ask Hungarians at any point of the last 16 years. The problem is that 30% vote in a conman. 29% of people try to prevent that. Then 100% of people suffer for years.

It happened in Poland and in Hungary.

And even if that scenario doesn't play out exactly like that it always works this way to some degree.

People need enlightened remote central power to protect them from local petty tyrants.

It's the same thing as HOAs. If there aren't enough laws (with enforcement) in place, people tend to be exploited by "voluntarily" chosen local tyrants. At the level of home owners associacion, or at the level of national government.

It doesn't work like that. The EU is established by the states and only has the authority to do what is delegated by the member states to the EU.

If Spaniards think their goverment is doing a bad job, why don't they vote them out? They are still a democracy, aren't they?

The opposition is also pleasing to LALIGA, that wouldn't change anything. And LALIGA managed to secure a legal ruling by a corrupt judge.

if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.

> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.

There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.

You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one.

according to my understanding yes, you are:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblockin...

i don't see mention of any exception for streaming there either. (maybe one exists, if you have a reference, i'd love to take a look)

They call it "audio-visual". From the page you linked:

> [...] services in sectors currently fully excluded such as transport and audio-visual

good catch, thank you.

if you look at the actual report summary however it shows that they want to change that:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-pub...

so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.

going back to the original question:

Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?

they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.

personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.

> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.

They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?

Yes, it has the authority. There are plenty of EU regulations that states must obey, from fundamental rights to taxation.

The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.

They don't have to do anything like that. Just create a law that says no country in the EU is allowed to block sites.

The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.

Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.

The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.

There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:

>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...

Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.

And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.

The EU is in favour of this kind of rubbish, as is the UK. We need to kick these idiots out of power.

And replace them with other idiots, who also support this rubbish? There isn't anyone who has sanity and decency, as their platform.

It seems the fundamental problem with democracy is that all the wrong people seek power, and the most qualified shy away from it.

Representative democracy.

Other forms exist. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-syste...

Sort of, but not really. It's more that people get complacent/ignorant when it comes to matters of power (they shy away), so by choosing to let go (a selfish endeavor) - a power vacuum is created, which others seize the opportunity for their own interest. In other words, democracy is not self-sustaining, it requires constant participation by everyone in order to sustain. As soon as people opt out, you have a minority determining things for everyone, and so you're no longer truly a democracy.

I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).

That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.

La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised

Both are problems. In Spain we have laws that are supposed to give us reasonable access to internet websites, and no one should be able to block large swaths of the internet in order to block access to few websites, supposedly at least. Clearly this been compromised, and the judges themselves seems to go against the law, but I'm hopeful it'd be restored one day.

> La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised

They technically haven't either. According to "ban-supporters", La Liga first reached out to Cloudflare asking them to shut down the pirate stream websites using Cloudflare. After Cloudflare rejected that, La Liga went to judges that approved forcing ISPs to ban specific IPs (related to the services) which happened to be Cloudflare IPs that other services uses too.

End result is the same, it fucking sucks sometimes when shit unexplicitly breaks before you remember there is a football game, but at least I think that's a bit more accurate to what's practically happening :)

I disagree, I think the bigger issue is blanket banning IPs because they can't decrypt the traffic.

This is the kind of manufacturing consent that would make some people be in favor of the government MITMing crypto so that they can verify that I'm not doing something naughty.

> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.

I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).

Yeah, if this is stopped, it'll be because of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights or the ECHR.

The Charter and the European Court of Justice is why we don't have blanket data retention in the EU but it took twelve years to strike down the Data Retention Directive (though it was killed off much faster in some national courts).

As a europe federalist, I would think it is more likely EU would implement these restrictions itself instead of step against Spain.

In theory, we should already be protected against this via the various "Net neutrality" directives, but as the US currently is showing us, laws and regulations are only worth as much as you're willing to enforce them ultimately. But things like these are supposed to be worth at least something:

> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...

Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).

The regulation has an opt out for court orders though, which these are.

If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:

- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.

- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"

- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.

- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).

So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.

> they're watching the match

Isn't that part of the problem? Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters.

There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.

And that's how greed ends up destroying itself.

They can easily get away with soccer because everyone is glued to the match. Tennis? Eh. Golf? No way.

Foot egg? I thought we were talking about soccer.

Hand egg is the other.

Oh right

did soccer balls change shape to warrant being compared to eggs?

Rugby?

Or maybe people just like watching football?

I live in the US and just finished watching a recording of Atletico vs Barcelona in the Champions League and it was incredibly entertaining.

> Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.

That's exactly when I would want to work on a side project after my full time job. Seems really harmful if Spain wants to have the possibility of individuals with full time jobs developing ideas that can turn into startups that could become unicorns.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Another one that the Europeans like to this effect is unrealized capital gains tax, to make sure you never make it to the unicorn stage.

> So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.

Is it actually worth fighting for principles to prevent slippery slopes? It seems most political battles in the US, especially the culture wars, are just about people's personal beliefs. It’s not that these issues affect them directly. It's they just want to make sure the other side doesn’t change their vision of the future.

> Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.

This is completely false. In the first half of this LaLiga season, the most watched match had 3 million viewers: https://barloventocomunicacion.es/informes-barlovento/el-fut... Spain has a population of almost 50M. So the most viewed match was around 6% of the population.

I’m not sure what makes you think you “know Spain” enough to throw this kind of ridiculous claim around, but please inform yourself.

Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.

LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.

That's kind of what I mean. From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person. Conveniences like iTunes->iPod and streaming services like Spotify did a lot to depress the popularity of music piracy for a decade+ after that, though it seems to have made a bit of a comeback recently, apparently as a result of streaming services losing licensing rights and generally tightening the belts on their services. You could almost argue that the RIAA's (abhorrent, yes) behavior created the vacuum for new services that competed with piracy legally.

I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.

> From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person.

Which, just to add some context, is exactly how people/groups who want to watch football at home does with football streams today in 2026 in Spain, except now also with a VPN of course. Regular football fans who have no idea how/why these streams work or where they're coming from and couldn't tell you the difference between a website and a desktop application, know the website addresses and the know-to about how to access them. Which is why you're seeing the reaction from La Liga and the courts.

> problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer?

Isn't this true in movies and other areas too? HBO and other distributors send DMCA requests left and right like everyone else, as far as I can tell, aren't they too then "the distributor and enforcer" or is that different somehow?

Thank you for the context, that makes sense and helps explain how it's so popular.

> Isn't this true in movies and other areas too?

That's a good point, though now I wonder if there's something particular to the content being live vs. VOD. By the time a DMCA request or equivalent pulls through for live content it might be too late to prevent the primary "theft" of the stream's value, vs. a movie distributed by HBO that has a longer tail of interest.

Football in Spain is usually sold by what used to be cable tv (now a mix of cable + Netflix-like streaming). Usually to get access to matches you need the most expensive package, which includes a bajillion services and might even be tied to a cell/internet provider. Footbal is their "killer feature" that enables 200 euro subscriptions.

They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.

This makes sense and the structure is similar to how sports packages are sold on US tv providers. It's getting somewhat better with more sports being streamed on big providers like Amazon but you more or less still have to pay out the ass and have to deal with local/national market exclusivity deals that make certain games unavailable.

I guess the question I'd have then is the economics of the pirate providers; I'm assuming that they have their own infrastructure costs to provide the streams at any level of reliability. Do they charge some nominal amount for access so that people who aren't willing to pay the full 200 euros for the top-tier official package can get just the sports games a la carte?

> Do they charge some nominal amount for access

The ones I've seen in wide use literally are "load page, click on Stream 1, it starts, if it breaks/looks shit, click on Stream 2 and repeat until good stream found", and also filled with ads, so I'm guessing they mostly run on ad-money. Most visitors aren't really technically inclined, I think I've lost count how many times I've helped people install ad-blockers once they try to get a stream running while a group of people are waiting.

>Do they charge some nominal amount for access so that people who aren't willing to pay the full 200 euros for the top-tier official package can get just the sports games a la carte?

Not usually, it's more like a 90's porn website setup, where you're going to click in a ton of fake links and close popups for a while until you reach a 720p stream.

Think that it's usually a bunch of very temporary services that popup and are taken down quickly, as well as a bunch of not-technically-pirate-themselves hubs that link to the former. There's not enough stability to set up payments, which are also traceable.

Anti piracy measures are crazy though. La liga has gone as far as to listen in microphones on user's apps in the hopes of catching hidden audio tones that, crossed with geolocation, allow them to detect streaming spots.

It's like gamers with anti cheat, a situation where the measures are both technically impressive and absurd overreach in a legal/moral sense.

> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"

I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.

One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

But copyright law does exist?

The pirates still exist. The legitimate users are punished.

Might as well abandon the law.

DRM is effective(ish) because of both technical and legal mechanisms. Without the legal mechanisms they'd ramp up the technical ones, which might end up even worse for legitimate users.

DRM is completely ineffective. It simply increases the cost of "piracy," as well as legitimate actions like home backup, to about $200 USD.

The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.

DRM is somewhat effective. I'm lazy enough about entertainment that I don't even bother with piracy. If content providers don't want to make it cheap and easy for me to watch then fuck 'em, I'll watch something else. I have a zillion other options.

The article is about sports leagues. I assume you're not as fungible with your choices there? Or at least, you'd agree, it isn't for the majority of the actual audience in question.

See old school satellite piracy for a clear example of where this is headed.

Someone mentioned this previously in thread about how piracy (at least for sporting events) are a price issue. If they didn't charge an arm and a leg to watch (thinking of the NBA/NFL tv packages) they wouldn't have a problem.

Except that it isn't true.

Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase.

They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was.

It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality.

For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.

Candycrush? I suppose you mean Crunchyroll, right?

That's right. Pervasive games got into my head.

As the other commenter, I also confirm the sub got worse.

I assume you meant Crunchyroll. They've gotten even worse recently by moving away from .ass subtitles which removes a ton of typesetting options

> just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever.

There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.

It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.

For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners.

Just because you own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions.

People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).

Everyone's poorer than you think, and sometimes the richest seeming people are under a mountain of debt.

> own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions.

Still, if you can't afford a €10/mo subscription necessary to operate the airplane safely, when hanger fees are well in excess of that, then perhaps you can't actually afford to own an airplane? Airplanes aren't cheap to own, nevermind the aircraft itself.

Put it another way. I like driving BMWs, but, y'know what, I hate having to pay insurance, and I can't afford to pay that after the monthly BMW lease payment, so I just don't pay it, cause fuck that noise.

I don't think most people's response to someone saying that would be "eh, sounds fine, BMWs are expensive". "So don't drive a BMW." seems like more likely reaction to me.

The reason people will tell you that is because paying for car insurance is rarely something you can just opt not to do, at least not without consequences. The consequence for not paying for a $10/month service is having to perform a minimally inconvenient chore once a week.

Indeed. Where I live, civil liability insurance is mandatory and if you own a car, you have to pay it, even if you don't intend to actively drive. It's not an optional cost.

Yeah, for a fucking airplane. In most of the world, that's way up there with yachts as a rich people toy rather than a everyday necessity. The real question though is, upon having discovered this, why allow them to keep doing that?

"I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks." The same habits that let a nouveau riche amass enough fortune to afford a plane make them penny pinch after they no longer need to.

Then don't use it. Use BBC weather. The sense of entitlement is insufferable.

That's crazy! I would LOVE to hear more of that.

Probably because resetting first is sufficiently easy for them, especially if they're not flying terribly often.

There will always be some amount of people who are too cheap to pay.

However, that doesn't mean that if you plug all the holes that they will pay. No. They'll just not use your service.

In the long run it's better to keep these types of people around because they at least advertise your service. But getting any money out of them is a pipe dream.

People often frame piracy as "oh 5% pirated instead of paying!" Well... the "instead of" part is doing the heavy lifting there. The options arent pirate or pay. They're pirate, pay, or not use.

In the short term, maybe. I don't think that's the case in the long run. They normalise the behaviour for others, even telling them about how to get around paying. I see strong clustering of the behaviour.

I read this as you are in fact in agreement with the statement. If that's the ceiling, provide the same level of service and gain more of the market. In which you have all the means to be faster, non-intrusive, and less faulty so that you can be always better.

When Spotify came along, music piracy all but vanished. It has already been proven in other media, it needs to happen with sports and streaming in general, then media piracy will be a thing of the past.

Perhaps, but I don't think the sports leagues and other video content providers will ever agree to letting their IP be devalued that way. They see what happened to musicians and record labels with Spotify as a cautionary tale, not a model to emulate.

Otoh, maybe Netflix and other streaming video services will start their own sports leagues in order to vertically integrate and own everything end-to-end just like what they did with TV and movie production. It would be tough and expensive but maybe not impossible?

Thats an interesting thought. Netflix are already starting get big sporting events like boxing matches, which are usually pay per view on other networks but included with subscription fee on Netflix. This might be crereping in the direction you are suggesting?

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/82699237

Music is the single field where copyright laws are enforced aggressively.

Plus signers and bands earn pennis from Spotify. Practically Spotify did vanished music privacy - by proving how bad a business it is to sell music and pushing the whole industry to personal branding (tours+ad revenue).

Yeah I suppose the same alternative is not really possible for video based media. I sometimes see producers touring their independant films along with a Q&A session, but I doubt that it is ever going to become popular to go and pay a venue to sit and watch your favourite show every week!

Can they try providing equal service to that? Ie, localized into English at the same time as the fans group, fast loading site, etc. In my experience they're usually noticeably behind in those areas even with a subscription active.

Official sites make things worse on purpose after getting any sort of traction because they can't stop chasing profits.

I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc.

When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible.

IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.

I mean you just proved that it's service problem.

I dunno, with advent of Mangaplus I basically stopped reading scanlations, except for a few cases that are not officially available online. Paired with Mihon, the experience is super smooth, all for 2 bucks per month - a very reasonable price. Compare that to Crunchyroll, which has some exclusives I'd like to read, but doesn't offer a good service and costs more - I choose to read something else and maybe download the rips some years later from Madokami.

Piracy is for teenagers and poor people.

How many middle class families can legitimately afford an extra $100/mo+ on multiple streaming services?

$100 is unheard of in Europe.

Netflix, Disney, HBO, Amazon, Apple, Movistar, DAZN. $100/mo estimate for that combo in Spain.

I see, we're talking combos now. The lowest end Moviestar package with soccer is 9 Euro.

Correct, I said “multiple” in my original post.

I don’t doubt you can watch one stream for 9 Euro. What happens when the game you want is with the other provider?

If watching this much videos from such large array of services is that important for a family I am sure they can easily cut down on other leisure and entertainment and come up just fine.

They dont need to wach "much videos". The argument is about "specific movies and series".

And for that, there are three options: piracy, pay many services, constantly juggle sign ins and sign outs.

A lot of spanish people live with less than 1000€ a month. You can barely rent a 2 bedroom flat in many cities with that.

100€ for leisure and entertainment is already a huge sum of money when filing the tank of their cars to earn their salary cost them 2 to 3x 80€ already.

Browse r/homelab and your view might change.

Wondering which of the 8 providers has your show is lame.

> Wondering which of the 8 providers has your show is lame.

Yep, but there is a solution. Buy physical media and rip it. You get basically the best quality available _and_ a backup at the same time. You don't have to resort to piracy to avoid streaming services.

Not all TV shows get a physical media release. Even when they do, it's not uncommon for them to be lower quality than the streaming release. (For example, the streaming release of The Expanse was 4k HDR, but the Blu-Ray release is 1080p SDR.)

I expect this will only get worse in the future - physical media is an increasingly niche product.

> Buy physical media and rip it.

Last time I tried to watch a dvd I rented it. I tried to watch it on a projector from my laptop. DRM prevented me. So I tried to watch in a standalone dvd player. It was region locked to a different region.

I’ve pirated ever since.

I subscribe to a fair few services but don’t watch stuff there. My *ars provide a better experience. It’s more expensive with the various services and hardware but it works.

My conscience is clear, I tried the ‘correct’ approach.

I guess I just wanna feel young again.

Is it not a pricing problem? Spotify is relatively cheap and has all the music. For the same video coverage I need 5+ streaming services that all increase prices significantly faster than inflation. This is just private equity over squeezing?

This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market?

Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.

Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.

To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.

> This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.

Is it possible the product just isn’t worth the price they want to charge? Entirely likely.

On average at population scale, people are shockingly good at voting with their wallets.

I agree, maybe people who play with a ball and their managers should get a pay cut instead of trying to optimize revenue streams through draconian measures.

> Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month. To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction.

Uh... Huh? How is EUR 20 * 20 approximately EUR 100?

If you do the maths correctly it’s in that range, roughly.

(100*12 months) = 1200 euros/year

1200/60 = 20

so 20x difference between the most expensive IPTV and the cheapest legal option. You can go with the 20 EUR IPTV vs the 200 EUR legal option and it would be 120x difference but probably the quality would be the same so let’s stick with the 20x.

Oh, per year. Duh. My bad. I just be tired, it's the second time in a few minutes that I've completely misread something.

No worries :) I shouldn't have been mixing months and years type subscriptions in first place.

Piracy isn't a service problem. Many people just want to consume media for free. It's true that poor service can exacerbate piracy, but even a good service isn't enough to dissuade pirates. Games that are completely convenient to download on Steam are still pirated.

Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.

You are always going to find fringe users that would pirate everything no matter what. Hours of search, bad quality, bad audio? They don't care, they rather watch that shit than pay a buck for it.

But they are fringe, an anomaly. Most people will happily pay for stuff if it's confortable enough. Don't focus on the tail end of the human behavior distribution. Steam makes a lot of money, the devs publishing there, too. Spotify makes a lot of money. Netflix makes a lot of money...

Piracy is easily reduced to anecdotical as soon as you don't offer absolute shit service for a lot of money, as LaLiga does.

To the contrary, data suggests that games lose about 20% of sales if they're cracked on day 1. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...

Good service is still hard to compete with zero cost.

> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom

I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.

It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.

I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.

Sometimes it's not just $5. It's $5, creating an account, handing over personal info, getting on a mailing list, agreeing to who knows what in a TOS, etc. Specifically, gamers look for cracks to allow them to play single player games offline. I don't doubt that some people are cheap, but there are lots of reasons aside from the price.

It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of me if I could just pay one-time prices. "Sure, fork over $10 and you can have a temporary account to watch the US Open this year." I will do that. In a single month I'll pay twice the cost of a monthly NYT subscription to read online articles, maybe $0.50/pop.

But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.

> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when

I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.

This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.

I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost)

I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.

> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.

What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?

> I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it

What's your point?

Try substituting some other verbs in there to see if it comes to you:

"I'd certainly wrestle less if I could afford it."

"I'd certainly eat less ice cream if I could afford it."

What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.

They wrote them out.

And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.

If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

> They wrote them out.

Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.

> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.

The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.

You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.

I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme.

I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.

Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.

Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.

Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.

Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.

Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy.

> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked

You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.

You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.

You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build.

My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

> we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone...illegally have access to the software we build.

Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.

> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.

> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.

> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.

I guess there's some confusion in that I don't think anybody's saying everyone should pirate everything all the time. That would, indeed, be problematic.

But if companies keep pushing people to piracy... well, I'm not going to blame the people first, that's for sure. Especially when things like TFA happen.

But if you can excuse it for yourself, why shouldn’t the same reasoning hold for everyone else? Do you not see the slippery slope here?

No, I don't really see the slippery slope. If there were such a slope, I would imagine that decades into this piracy thing, we'd be sliding down it. Yet most people don't pirate. Strange?

So you really don't understand that it should be OK for everyone to pirate if it's OK for you? Would you ever tell someone it's not OK? If so, why? And what makes you special and different?

We aren't saying anything you are implying.

You've started with a retort to a point that some who would never pay for some copyrighted work are not a loss to copyright owner if they illegally use their work.

You've since expanded to everyone and SW development, and want to extend it to people who are willing to pay for the value a particular work provides them.

So let's go back to the beginning: can you please quantify how big is a loss to the copyright owner if one watches a movie they would skip if the only option was to pay for it?

No, I'm not going to do that. And here's why: because if you have an excuse, everyone has an excuse. And if everyone has an excuse, the entire system falls apart.

I'll reiterate what I said above: entertainment and software are not life's essentials. Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.

> Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.

Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.

On the other hand, I bet there have been some pretty serious repercussions due to the sweeping bans like in TFA.

> Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.

The logic here is quite simple: if you don't have to pay, nobody else has to pay, either, because you're not special. If nobody pays, then people who make media and software won't get paid, and production will slow to a crawl. You'll have destroyed the very thing you seem to desire enough to steal.

How does this not make sense to you?

Maybe because I'm not so arrogant as to imply everyone has to have the same views and act the same way as me, nor to imply that my view is the only right one.

But nah, you're right. Nobody has to pay. Everybody should pirate.

Now, that's been true for decades, of course. So why hasn't the entire system fallen apart?

> I'm not so arrogant

Believing oneself to be special and above the law such that one feels justified in trampling on others' rights is textbook arrogance.

Not everyone in the world is subject to the same laws.

To say nothing of what all that means when those laws are unjust and themselves serve to trample on individuals' rights.

> Not everyone in the world is subject to the same laws.

Are you?

> To say nothing of what all that means when those laws are unjust and themselves serve to trample on individuals' rights.

What rights are you speaking of, exactly?

They are not: if they never travel to Afghanistan or Ethiopia, they will not be subject to their laws.

Laws change even in the same region, so it is also temporal.

And one can work to change the laws too.

But it does not make sense, you have your pre-defined opinion and you are sticking with it, and we do not buy your argument, so it's best we agree to disagree here.

I'm not sure to understand where is the loss because the pirate would not pay for the product anyway.

1. We don't know that. Perhaps they would pay, at a lower price.

2. If it's OK for one person not to pay, why should anyone pay?

1. A copyright owner can test this easily by offering a discount.

2. Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds. Because it is available in their country legally. Because their streaming package already includes it. Because their cable package already includes it... Need I continue?

Again, you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.

Nobody loses any money if you spill profanities at someone, but it's still not OK (even though it might not be illegal either).

Legallity and morality are not always in sync even if we try to keep one reflect the other. I am surprised this is even a discussion point.

> Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds.

Those are reasons that someone might choose to pay. These are also the same reasons why one might want to donate to charity or to non-profit/public media (PBS, NPR in the USA). In other words, they're a voluntary patron of the arts. And there's nothing wrong with that, when the organizations are non-profit/public or charitable. In fact, I think we'd all encourage it.

However, not every media organization is a non-profit/public operation or a charity. Those who are made a choice to be that. Those who didn't--well, they chose to remain for profit.

The point is that we, as individuals, do not get to override the choice of whether a publisher is for profit or non-profit by taking the law into our own hands--just like I don't get to turn your back yard into a public park when you're not using it. After all, you're not using it, right?

You and others keep saying, "no loss in revenue, no harm done." (Just like, "no loss of use of your back yard, no harm done.") But that's not the point. It's about infringing on others' rights.

> you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.

This is just silly: Where does the profit come from if nobody pays? Again: if you don't have to pay, it must follow that nobody should have to pay. If you disagree with that, then who gets to choose who pays and who doesn't? You? No; that's for the law to decide. That's how democracy works.

(removed)

Fair enough, I take it back.

it's shocking to me that you refuse to see that the "awful experience" your friend has is not better than what they give people who pay. are you a billionaire literally out of touch with reality and the cost of living?

insane response. feign shock, lie, insult, non sequitur

your argument is that one person puts up with the annoyance of switching tabs to avoid paying, ignoring the fact that many people these days actually pay for the pirated sports packages to avoid that annoyance, it's a huge business.

sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.

> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service,

The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.

If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:

Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled

The illegal workflow looks like this:

Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it

I strongly believe the fact that media companies struggle to accept payments worldwide and region-lock their content when you do pay is why their services ultimately suck for customers.

Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.

As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.

> my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it"

There were no movie-rental businesses in your country?

> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service

Now that you can just pay 10-20 euros for each of 124293507239841524352 services, one of which _might_ show what you want...

Fixed it for you.

My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.

I liked it better at 10 a month tbh. If they keep increasing the price like Amazon they need to offer more features to compensate.

Yes and no. Storage should cost in the ballpark of $200M/yr or less. Transcoding, networking, and delivery should be similar. Let's round up to $10B/yr just for fun.

YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.

A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.

Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.

> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.

But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.

However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...

It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks).

This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)

But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.

Most games are cracked within days. The number that survive for over a month without a crack is small, largely limited to Denuvo protected games.

> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.

It is not the same until you test the effect of illegal copies of games not having any DRM protection at all (easy to copy/use illegally) on sales.

Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.

If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?

By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.

I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.

The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.

> By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.

This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.

In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.

In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.

Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

> Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.

> In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

Many (most?) publishers release versions of games without DRM ounces cracks are available. What you describe here is not necessarily the case.

If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes. If there is such a population of would-be buyers that are turned off by DRM, they are evidently smaller than the pool of buyers who would have chosen to pirate if given the opportunity.

Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

> But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.

If you're trying to determine Z, which is X - Y, and then you get some indication that Y might be 20 under a specific set of assumptions, you still don't know anything about Z because X could still be 0 or 20 or 40. Measuring Y by itself is useless. It's looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is even though you know that's not where you lost them.

> If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes.

That's assuming the removal of the DRM is well-publicized like the initial release. Otherwise people hear about the initial release, don't buy it because it has DRM and then most of them forget the game even exists. And negative reviews from when the game had bad DRM are still there even after it's removed.

It could still be net positive to remove the DRM after it's cracked but the benefit is naturally going to be a lot smaller than if it had no DRM when people were paying more attention to it.

Also, has anyone actually studied that? Most of the resources to do studies on these things are from DRM purveyors who want to make their product look better than it is. They don't have the incentive to find results that make them look bad.

> Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

You're still focused on measuring only Y.

To be clear, what is measured is the proportional change in sales following the release of a crack, relative to other released games that went uncracked for longer. I don't know what percentage of games removed DRM after the crack was released, but let's assume they do.

If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.

We're not measuring Y, we're measuring Z. And since Z is negative, we can conclude that the group of people who just want free games is larger than the group of people who buy after DRM is removed. We know that Y is larger than X.

> If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.

Now you're assuming that all games immediately remove DRM after they're cracked, which is definitely false. In a statistical study it would need to be all of them or any that don't would be skewing the average.

And again, removing the DRM doesn't fully undo the hit from having it to begin with. Existing negative reviews or forum posts panning the game don't disappear the instant you address the thing they were complaining about. The network effect and word of mouth in subcultures that don't buy games with DRM is already reduced.

So if a game launches with DRM it's forever tainted and that group of people who supposedly would have bought the game absent DRM won't buy it - even if the DRM is subsequently removed. But on the flip side, if a game doesn't launch with DRM then it's pirated immediately and there's no way to measure the sales in the period pre and post-crack, because there effectively is no pre-crack period.

You've constructed an unfalsifiable claim here.

By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

A game can have DRM restrictions or not when published. I am referring to games that never had DRM restrictions but which you obtained illegally (eg. you copied it from a friend or downloaded it from internet).

Games that never had DRM restrictions to begin with are also pirated on day 1. There's no way to measure the sales before and after a crack is released, because the former period is basically zero.

Those goalposts way over there are looking very tiny.

What "to the contrary"? The statements "some people will not pay no matter what" and "DRM increases sales" are mutually compatible.

> There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.

Yes, and those people are not part of the group who will not pay no matter what.

Jumping in with one persons anecdotal evidence but I loved when I can pay $10 a month for Netflix when it had everything or almost everything I could watch and I quit pirating. When the content from other networks got pulled and the prices starting getting jacked up I went back to the seven seas. A good service with good quality at a decent price is awesome but 10 different services all trying to gouge me for $15-$20 a month with no guarantee the content I like won’t be removed in a few months is ludicrous and led me right back to not paying anything.

I'm almost in the same boat, except I never stopped pirating. By the time I decided to consider Netflix to see if the added convenience was worth it, the enshittification had already begun, so I just continued as I was. I'm definitely not in the "won't pay no matter what" camp, but I am pretty price-sensitive and I have a fairly high bar of satisfaction, which Steam and GOG meet but music and video streaming do not. I definitely think Gaben is mistaken, and that for most people it's both service and price. Steam would not have been as successful in reducing piracy in the PC market without all the discounts, all else being equal.

How is that to the contrary at all? 20% and not 100% with a ton of people just not playing the game at all, presumably

For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.

The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)

Just to put some context into what _never_ means here:

If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.

Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).

There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.

With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!

I'd happily pay for DRM-free content, but it's rarely available in digital form in smaller markets like non-EU European country of Serbia: the only alternative is to look for BR or DVD or CD copies and then rip them myself, which is even more time consuming than finding a decent quality not-so-legal option.

Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.

And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)

For me at least, it is a service problem.

> I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.

Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.

Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)

You dont understand that there are other mentalities / mindsets than yours. Well they are, and they can be rotten pretty badly.

What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU/Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.

I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.

Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.

Cumulatively, they are not few bucks. Those few bucks add up to serious portion of the salary for lower paid people.

As Spaniards, we have not gone through communism but we have gone through a dictatorship where we went through a lot of misery. Maybe that mentality will come there.

In any case, in Spain the level of penetration of streaming services seems high. Although you will always find people who pirate (it was very common when Canal+ existed, etc., then it decreased with the arrival of Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Prime) and now with prices continuously rising I hear a lot about IPTV and pirate decoders.

Although I believe that in the specific case of LaLiga, much of the fault lies with the prices imposed. The dominant and more traditional operator (also the most trillero) only offers you the service through convergent Megapacks with attractive prices when hiring and crazy when renewing. The arrival of DAZN has softened it but I don't think it will improve the situation in the medium term. It is very curious that they then reach agreements in emerging markets to offer the price-drawn product (China) and in no case the income is reflected in a more competitive League.

Radically changing area, in the field of software there is the culture of paying the minimum. If it can be zero better, even if it means visiting dubious sites and risking your data and credit cards.

My vision may be biased. In fact it is ;-)

I pay for a ton of sports content across a ton of platforms. I used to pirate a ton of sports across a ton of platforms.

I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription doesn’t work when my team plays on an Apple TV broadcast but that’s 1-2 times a year.

Maybe I was not good at piracy but it took just about the same effort to find the right links, deal with constant buffering, etc. But I find it pretty phenomenal that I can easily watch just about any sporting event now with little difficulty

> I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you.

Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.

What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.

And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.

This made me give up on league pass. How hard is it for them to just provide every single game for one price? It's insane. It's honestly a big reason I don't follow NBA any more.

People are willing to tolerate worse service to avoid paying. And people still private even when the legitimate service is extremely convenient.

Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.

I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.

But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.

Bingo. If US/EU wanna regulate tech, these are the things to regulate.

I feel your frustration however the charge per episode/song/article etc plans I believe all failed.

Early on Apple sold individual songs and leaned hard into selling individual TV episodes for a $2 (if I remember correctly). It was unpopular and people flocked to the lines of Netflix and Spotify instead.

Maybe he does not think he deserves it? The logic is as follows. If he has to pay $10 for 90 minutes of watching football then he must think he deserves that. But if he can get it for free then he does not need to think he deserves it. Similar to how fat people may feel less guilty about eating candy when it is given to them than when they have to buy it.

Netflix was ok when it was the only platform. Now that there are 10(?) platforms, and each of them has tiers, it is a service problem

Remember when a directtv subscriber bought the annual sports pack because they wanted to watch their team's matches, and just when the game was about to start the transmission was interrupted showing "not availabe in your area", and they called support to ask and were told for the first time by the rep that someone else has the airing rights, and to read TOS?

It is the same thing you are going towards.

Your friend exists, and he is not alone. But the vast mayority of people just want to watch what they were told they paid for, and not paying 10 different people either.

Some people are just like that. They'll spend several times as much effort as just earning the money honestly would take. The thrill of petty crime I guess.

It’s probably more the challenge and the puzzle. I “played” PokémonGo until they shut down the apis. I had an absolute blast making a bot for that game, letting it run all night, making sure I wouldn’t get caught.

As soon as they shut the api down I uninstalled the app. The fun bit was the challenge.

I am part of this crowd. I have never paid a cent for software. I have spent many hours with Ida pro and Ghidra.

That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.

But see you're making up reasons that are separate rationalizations. Which just proves the guys point, that even you don't think what you're doing is reasonable without some superfluous reason

It's absolutely a service problem. I can pay for the local sports rebroadcast packages.. but oh wait, you just don't feel like this week, playing the Raptors game, because there's a local thing you think people will watch? Fair enough, subscribe to DAZN, and pay there.. oh sorry, we've opted to stop carrying <insert all leagues>.

Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?

I'm literally paying you for the service. So yeah, giving some insanely sketchy crypto website $5/month for unlimited whatever that just always works, is worth it. 10/10 will definitely do again. I'm sick and tired of fighting with the NBA, the CFL, or G-D only knows what just to try to watch the things I'm paying for.

> Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?

I live in an NBA "dead zone". I'm in the streaming blackout zone. But not in the TV zone (even if I did pay for TV, which I'd almost consider).[1] And then I VPNed to Canada for international LP, but that wasn't much better. Then Mexico. And then ...

Then I found a site that had an actual Roku app (at least) that took payment in Crypto or Amazon GC but was absolutely uninfested, no ads, no garbage, probably at times more reliable than even the NBA's app. But they got shut down.

Not to mention LP refused to refund me though my subscription was effectively useless because I "could still watch the games, and without commercial or timeout breaks, even!" - yeah, 24 to 72 hours after it was played. Yay. Lucky me.

Most software piracy is more convenient then what you describe.The warez takes pride in making the best cracks available.

> see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.

A common phrase used to be "I pirate the software so I can afford the hardware". There's a tangibility to hardware that's not present for software and media, which means many people simply don't feel it's worth what is being charged, especially media intended to be consumed once and forgotten about (e.g. a sports match). Computer hardware is a durable good.

That said, I pretty much stopped pirating things when Steam got decently good and I was working a normal professional job. Prior to that, I really did have to choose what I was willing to pay for, and I really did get a better experience using pirated software vs buying the legit thing. At this point though, I get a better than average experience through Steam on Linux (I just avoid any games with Denuvo or other kernel-level bullshit), and I can easily afford both the hardware and the software, so the convenience and quality of experience + my better purchasing power makes it pointless to even engage in piracy anymore.

I'd like to think I'm a rational actor, sort of, and so are a lot of other people. Paying 79-115 EUR/mo to watch a few matches, in a country where the average monthly take-home pay is around 1700 EUR, you're talking about asking for nearly 7% of the average take-home pay /just/ to watch soccer. To put this into context, the common wisdom is to spend 30% on housing, so La Liga is saying its reasonable to ask a Spaniard to spend 1/4th what they do on housing on just the ability to watch soccer matches. No wonder people would rather find pirated streams.

One of the easiest things to pirate is music. Spotify basically killed mainstream piracy of music by making it cheap and easy to pay for nearly all music.

I used to pirate video games, but Steam basically ended that for me. The sales no longer make it worth it for me to pirate a $60 game, instead, I can buy it for $12 on sale.

For software, I used to pirate Adobe products and Sony Vegas, but there are alternatives for those now.

For something like sports, I think the cost can be hundreds of dollars per season. I watch the NFL and NHL, and to watch every game that I'd like to watch, it would cost me something like $600+ per year. There aren't really viable alternatives. I'd have to get three services to watch all of the NHL games I want to watch, and I don't even know how many services I need for the NFL. Amazon Prime, Sunday Ticket, CBS, Fox? Or cable/YouTubeTV with additional packages?

I'd happily pay $100 or $200 per year to watch all games in a league for a year if it was through a single service. Or a lump sum for all sports. But in the same amount of time to enter my payment information, create an account, etc. I could have easily found a stream and have it on any TV in my house.

So obvious solution is for sports streamers offer free stream too, but riddled with ads just enough that it is slightly better than illegal ones?

> It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles

The question is, how does this happen? Which brings us back to the "it's a service problem" thing.

If your company is using intrusive DRM, lobbying for draconian laws, violating antitrust, filing menacing lawsuits against individuals or smaller companies etc. then it's not hard to see how a lot of people could conclude they have a moral obligation to never pay you a cent. And the same sentiment can affect the whole industry when companies in a position to don't push back against other companies doing those things, since the stink spreads to anyone using the same laundromat.

Monopoly: It is not just "LaLiga" who stands to lose money, it is Telefonica/Movistar which is the only owner of most of sports right in Spain, and they know they can set the price they want because

+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.

+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.

+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.

+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...

Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.

They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.

They don't stream on YouTube.

It’s very easy to watch pirated streams, it’s insanely complicated to reliably watch the official streams.

This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.

Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.

>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.

And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.

There is only a market if there is a commodity.

La Liga is not a commodity as I can not equally make a La Liga.

This is the basis for antitrust regulations.

So no, there is not market. And as such there is no markets that functions as it should.

Absolutely incorrect. A market is just any structure, place, or mechanism that allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods, services, information, or assets. There can be one seller and many buyers, one buyer and many sellers, or anything in between.

If I go to your stall and coercively take a product you want 1000 tokens for, but only leave 10 tokens. Then it is still a market? It certainly fits the definition you present.

Inwould argue that price discovery is a bit part of a market. Again, these things are already codified. Eg. Wash trades, insider trading, etc.

Markets don't make sense for non-fungible products.

If it were a true market, the price would be much lower because it wouldn't be a monopoly.

A market is not defined by how many sellers there are.

If you want the market to "function as it should", then yes, the number of sellers plays a big role in a properly functioning market. Thats why we have regulations in additional to the invisible hand.

The ones who pirate the sports broadcasts are in the right. Spectator sports are literally brainwashing: they hook into vestigial tribal instincts, reinforce them, and channel them for political goals - such as norm-setting, or extrajudicial violence.

Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!

At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.

when connected health device cause a death I guess

No really.... more so when some giant multinational that is bribing (lobbying is just legalized bribes, lets use the real word for it) the politicians start to loose money. Then an exception will be made for them, and they will continue. What they really want is for Cloudflare and others to give in and police it for them.

What kind of health devices require reliable internet connection to prevent death?

Certain medical devices have remote monitoring. You won't die without internet, but your doctor might not receive updates from the device.

I sure hope connected health device makers include some generous tolerance for network outages.

you think that a few deaths would stop this? optimistic...

Eh, if they block things when every sport or any movie is being shown, it will be reliable. Reliably blocked. :P

There was a case two weeks ago about someone unable to locate their missing parent with a tracking application (I'm assuming the parent has some sort of dementia) because the application could not connect to the servers. Link in spanish https://hipertextual.com/actualidad/los-bloqueos-de-laliga-e...

I am pretty sure Telefónica will tell people they can just switch to their own services.

Telefonica has a business branch that offer some services similar to cloudflares ones like CDN, DDOS Protection, etc...There is a huge conflict of interest here to use copyright law to make cloudflare and other competitors customer's life as crappy and unusable as they can.

Its time we started whittling it back.

Oh hi HN, I'm one of the folks behind https://hayahora.futbol, we monitor the blocks via a varying set of homelab infrastructure to at least try to make a bit more transparent when they occur and what gets blocked (which isn't public, and we have to guess). Feel free to AMA!

Thanks for the website, really usefull - hopefully it will save me quite some time I am trying to debug a network issue on another sunday afternoon!

My question is - as someone on a sibling thread pointed out - it just showed "NO" while the champions league Madrid game was on. And that match is particularly mentioned in the above news article as to be the first match where these new changes come into effect. So were there no blocks, or did they change blocking scope? Or is it just a measuring issue, perhaps?

They just did not block anything today, the YES/NO is based on some frontend logic about the amount of IPs being blocked over multiple ISPs. The enforcement and exactitude of these blocks is pretty sloppy on their end so, despite the news today, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them a bit longer to start blocking during these matches.

Will you guys update the site if what OP talks about ends up taking effect? I guess that at that point the domain name would be a bit out of place.

Maybe, although I don't think a lot of blocks will happen about anything other than different kinds of football. Given their following in Spain and the market I'd expect much more rampant piracy on F1 or MotoGP much sooner than... golf? which likely has a very very niche following in comparison. Surprising they didn't puruse about either of both, maybe because of different rightholders in the middle.

News like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.

Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.

To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.

I did manage with Cloudflare's WARP, now is called Cloudflare One [1] because the 1.1.1.1 DNS

- [1]https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/team-and-re...

Yes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns

IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )

My Tailscale exit node disagrees ;)

do you mind to elaborate ? are you connecting from out of Spain, I'm curious how fucked up the situation is.

> This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian.

Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.

I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.

Yes, works with any VPN.

Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.

I spend a lot of time every year in Spain. VPNs work but sometimes you are forget about those Internet outages and are wondering why some services suddenly stop working. Some of them stop working in mysterious ways as well (for example if they host just some resources on Cloudflare).

It's frankly ridiculous because it's very easy to use a VPN and stream w/e anyway. I don't watch football, tennis or golf but I use VPN regularly to watch Australian TV.

Come together as a country and boycott couple of games, cancel subscriptions and see how quickly stream owners turn around.

> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.

> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.

Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time

Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.

> I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League

Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions:

"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."

The site tracks not football matches, but when blocks occur, and, right now, there are not any.

(The whole joke about the site is trying to detect football happening via internet blocks, as otherwise myself personally I wouldn't know at all otherwise about matches happening)

Yes, I'm aware of what joke the website tried to make, I was trying to explain how the "joke name" ("Is there football on right now?" in English, in case it wasn't clear) didn't quite make sense, because of the blocks only affecting La Liga games.

This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.

They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America.

Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.

If they pass laws “with impunity” you can’t blame the voters that hard.

This is America. We gerrymander the vote and blame the victim. Sorry you got downvoted.

the voters don't vote on issues, and there are no consequences for breaking campaign promises. and direct democracy is le bad, of course (since Brexit).

Direct Democracy is bad because even if people were capable of doing the hard work to actually decide on coherent trade-offs, for which there is precious little evidence, they do not have time which means we should hire a few people to do that hard work, and that's what an Indirect Democracy is.

I think direct democracy is bad for a couple of reasons (some are probably rephrased versions of another reason):

* not everyone can be an expert on everything;

* people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about;

* people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on;

* people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would;

* people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much;

* only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues;

* education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam;

* people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote;

* it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it).

If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.

I've always wondered if a hybrid system could work. You'd need a lot of voting infrastructure, and you need online voting, which means you need a reliable and quick method of online identification. Scandinavian countries fill those prerequisites, perhaps other places do too.

The idea is basically that you give a politician a mandate to use your vote. Whatever your chosen politician votes for will count as their and your vote. If you happen to disagree with your chosen politician on a given question, you can manually vote in that question. Your chosen representatives vote in that question will then be worth one vote less, since you've effectively used it yourself.

In the end we get the best of both worlds: voters don't have to vote in every single issue, but they can should they choose to. When they don't vote themselves, a politician they've chosen gets to use their vote, in a representative-like manner.

That's pretty much Switzerland. Indirect democracy for most things, but if enough people disagree with what the government does or they feel strongly about something the government isn't doing they can call a referendum.

Huh...I guess that means it does work: From the outside at least Switzerland appears to work pretty well!

Chicken or egg?

Let's have a referendum to decide.

I don't know. Direct democracy seems to work well in Switzerland and badly in California. So direct democracy is clearly not bad per se. We know it can work.

Don't you bring nuance into this, this is the internet. Let alone suggest a populace would need to know it.

I don’t know if just one instance means direct democracy is bad. For example, in the US referendums have been used a lot for issues that are popular for voters, but politicians won’t touch.

(Weed legalization in many states, Abortion protection in Missouri I believe)

You could also argue Brexit. Ultimately, most of the UK was okay with shooting themselves in the foot to feel more independent like the good olds days. Maybe was wrong long-term, but if it’s what the people wanted, then maybe it’s good. Politicians never would have done it despite the people wanting it.

I'm anti-Brexit (not that it matters, not British) but also pro-referendum in general. One modification I'd like to see is higher thresholds for more significant actions, especially ones that are difficult to reverse like this was. I don't think something as huge as Brexit should be decided on the basis of 50%+1. There should be a bias towards the status quo, and this should require maybe 60% or 2/3rds to overcome.

I'm afraid that could lead to political instability. Maybe not, but I imagine if 59% of people vote "X" but 60% were needed, people could revolt or at least drastic and unpredictable changes in voting in the next elections could happen - "how can this political regime ignore the voice of the majority?!".

You'd need most of the people to understand why 60 or 66.(6)% of people are needed to decide something and really believe in this threshold. And Y% of the populace is different psychologically than Y% of elected officials (in cases where a supermajority of officials are needed to pass Z in a forum like parliament/house/senate).

Even if you accept that party affiliation determines the vote, there are primaries. Which see horribly low turnout, which is 100% the voters' fault.

Long before Brexit, I was bemoaning the bad effects of direct democracy in California for constitutional amendments that pass with a simple majority. A good amount of the dysfunction in California is from these sorts of propositions that can not be overruled or modified by the legislature. And the public debate about them is largely divorced from their actual content, quite frequently. You still encounter people that think that Prop 13 is a about letting grandmas stay in their homes in retirement by sheltering them from any increase in property taxes, but it is a much much larger handout to commercial real estate and investment properties than it is to grandmas, for example!

Even a slightly higher threshold than majority vote would be good for direct democracy. And constitutional amendments should either have a higher bar, or should automatically expire after X years unless there's a second vote to verify that the change should actually stay in effect.

I tend to vote no on all ballot propositions automatically due to the bad effects of permanent changes being far too easy with too little substantive information provide to voters.

However laws that stop large corporations' websites being accessible would never be passed in the US. Government for the corporation.

It describes hierarchy and power more than it does intelligence

> how stupid the world can be

This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.

> This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.

Those two go hands in hands.

Only if you're all playing the same game. Corruption usually happens because some players have higher priorities.

Speaking of which, the PM is surrounded by people a judge is currently indicting for various forms of corruption

His wife, right hand man, etc

What's that saying about the company you keep...

>enact similarly stupid laws.

No new law was enacted. The ISPs are enforcing a court order.

This has not so much to do with the law, but the execution of it.

It seems vastly inproportionate. And is likely severe overstepping.

The issue is that spain does not have a backstop. It is a completely institutional failure.

That's why you can laugh at them. Because this level of instutional failure should not happen where I come from.

The epitaph on the tombstone of this civilization shall read:

Zealously mistook malice for stupidity.

Not lawmakers in this case, but judges having no understanding of what they're ruling on.

That's why one company should not be allowed being an ISPs and a media company.

Last year a judge almost blocked all of telegram for everyone :( also because of a complaint of some large telco. Luckily they realised the extreme impact of this decision and reverted it.

Hopefully, reaction is read as to the action, not some categorization of the actor

"hate the sin, love the sinner", or something

Finland was the first country to grant its citizens the right to internet access in law.

Other countries including Spain have laws "ensuring that access is broadly available and preventing unreasonable restrictions."

Something has to give.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensur...

The internet was a mistake anyway, they should just ban it completely and be done with it.

Are there any ways in Cloudflare to mitigate against this? If all sports matches basically mean "our clients can't access our Cloudflare backed app in Spain" then it's worse than fewer-nines; it's a correlated event that could disrupt things like travel checkins, etc. - and it's a hard pitch to say "Cloudflare costs us money and it has no solution for its network putting our Spanish arrivals at risk."

Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers

Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.

Regional accents are a thing and stuff like Argentinian Candy Candy or Cuban Mazinger Z are totally childhood-defining.

Ironically I never watched Dragon Ball in Castillian Spanish but for the OVA's. I've watched the series in Basque long before the Spanish dub ever existed (the Basque one was from 1990) and yes, the manga was a perfect 100% translation, so most of the Latin American memes about dubs don't apply to me.

Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.

I never understood this attitude from native speakers towards their own language. I am a fresh NL citizen, and have struggled SO MUCH to assimilate into society largely due to this prevalent mentality of "dutch sux actually, we can all speak english amirite guys??" its so bafflingly self-destructive to your own culture. But go off I guess.

I didn't understand him that way. It's more that it helps if people can more easily pick up a foreign language, or solidify their skills, along the way through media. Doubly so when it's a lingua franca like English.

Though for you, I understand you might have been peeved if people kept switching to English when you just wanted to practice Dutch.

Yes, I meant it that way. And yes, Dutch people too easily switch to English when someone they encountered is not very proficient in Dutch. It is a kind of 'helpfulness' which is not so helpful for foreigners who want to learn Dutch, and I agree that more Dutch people should make the effort and not the easy language switch.

You've probably never watched Indiana Jones speak French... I was forced to when staying for 2 weeks in the south of Belgium as part of a French immersion program. It's unbearable.

When I watch an American movie, I want to hear it the way the director intended it to be. I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice. If I want to hear Dutch in a movie, I watch a Dutch movie. It's not that deep.

The fact that it helps kids learn a different language is a very nice fringe benefit.

I remember watching an English movie with an incorrect subtitle in school when I was 12, well before my first English class. The whole auditorium laughed because everyone caught the error.

> I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice.

Sounds like your problem is with crappy, cheap dubbing, not dubbing in general.

Look at Disney animation for dubbing done right (and more so in the 20th century - these days I’m not so sure).

Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.

A cartoon is the worst possible example.

Tell us more.

I don't think that generalize to dubs as concept itself, I know for the fact that Japanese dub of Commando(1985)[1] is quite something.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commando_(1985_film)

I’m a Dutch native and if it were up to me we’d switch to English. I think it’s dumb that small country like us feels the need to maintain its own language.

It is a massive disadvantage. It means that we’re always late with new stuff because the Dutch market is so small no one wants to make the effort of building Dutch versions.

Language is the biggest thing that defines culture. Do you want the Netherlands to perform some sort of countrywide assimilation into British or American culture?

> Language is the biggest thing that defines culture

Lots of countries would disagree with this. Do you not think Peru and Spain has distinct cultures for example? Why/why not?

As you can clearly see, I did not say language was the only thing that defines culture.

Do you think Peruvian culture is closer to Spanish or Swedish culture?

Your second question, "Do you want the Netherlands to perform some sort of countrywide assimilation into British or American culture?", really makes it unclear if you actually realize that language isn't the only thing that defines culture, why would that be a question otherwise?

Small countries are already doing this through the Internet since so much of the consumed content is in English.

Yes, I’m a huge proponent of global unification. It’s ridiculous that we have different cultures, languages and laws based on between which imaginary lines on a map you live.

Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.

What a sad world where we all have the same culture and language. There's many concepts that don't translate from one language to the next, they form a way of looking at the world. What about foods, and stories and music, nah, sounds terrible.

I also want one big world for all but definitely not a single culture or language

So there's only one single culture in all english speaking countries? A unified language does not in any way imply a boring or "assimilated" culture. Dutch people can still ask their closest friend to Venmo them 2 bucks for the fries they took earlier, germans can still make and drink objectively better beer, and the french can still be black and white and smoking a cigarette. But just in english instead.

OP literally advocated for having a single culture.

And you missed the part I said about how different human concepts don't exist in all languages, do we just not have those? Language is an integral part of different cultures, not the only one, but a pretty big one. Can't believe I'm having to defend this.

Frankly, this belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works.

I'm a native Swede and I've said the same about Swedish to, don't really care if it's Mandarin, English or Spanish, just that as many countries as possible go together and unify under one language. Obviously both for Netherlands and Sweden, English would be the way to go, but imagine if you could learn just 3 languages and speak with 90% of the world's population? I thought globalism would take us there eventually somehow, but seems the pendulum started swinging the other way instead.

Yup, there is a lot of value in having universal language and English is the only one with a chance (in Western world anyway). Imo EU should mandate English as 2nd official language for all business dealings and bureaucracy. Having many languages and obligatory translations is a huge disadvantage we have in comparison to USA (or China).

FWIW, Mandarin is not the universal spoken language of China. It's just the lingua franca of China as the region. They actually have something like a dozen major groups of dialects with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.

The place read as Shang-hai in Mandarin is apparently read Zan-he in the local "dialect" spoken there. I think one could say Koln and Cologne sound closer together.

Did anyone say that Mandarin is the "universal spoken language" of China? IIRC, >90% of Chinese people speak Mandarin as either a 1st or 2nd language.

I don't think as many did 20 years ago, but China is consciously Mandarinizing, and English has lost its spot as the standard second language with the vastly increasing hostility from the West.

It's really not that hard. I lived in NL for a year and assimilated Dutch just about as well as my flatmate (a German who was taking a taking a Dutch language class)

Go out and pay attention to your surroundings. Read everything. Make dutch friends. Spend some time outside the large cities.

Dutch is already like half English just spelled and pronounced way differently.

It is 'destructive' to Dutch culture if you don't dub a movie in a foreign language? I claim the opposite. Doesn't pretend everything happens in your own culture, feels more like a kind cultural erasure of sorts. There's still more than enough TV content in native language. What I also noticed often in dubbed material is that the dubbed voice has inaccurate translation, subtle reformulations, or skips spoken words entirely, which in more autoritarian countries gives wriggle room to subtle media manipulation. The Dutch get it straight from the horse's mouth at least.

Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunities for local VA talent.

But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.

I mean, I also prefer to consume subtitled content, but sometimes it's nice to have the option to look away from the screen and not miss dialog. Some video content can even be consumed as audio-only content and not much will be missed.

Dubbed content is ok for young children I guess.

I'd probably say that most of my early English was learnt by reading subtitles and listening to American cartoons and shows on TV while eating breakfast before school. If it was dubbed, probably once I got my first computer I'd have a way harder time understanding at least the tiny bits I did understand.

> reading subtitles

So you were already reading. What about younger children?

That said - I fully agree, I’m surprised I don’t speak with a Star Trek accent given where I had most of my early exposure to English.

I dunno, younger than 5-6 I think most children don't really understand plot lines or whatever anyways so it matters less, a cartoon in English is probably as fun and engaging as one in the native language.

> younger than 5-6 I think most children don't really understand plot lines or whatever

My experience has been the opposite :) but hey.

The only reason not to dub a cartoon is that you're an adult who cares about quality and the dubbing is usually done for a smaller audience so it is going to be worse.

There's no reason not to be dubbing cartoons for kids. That's a dorky debate for grown-ass adults playing animu purists.

Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.

Vice versa for most Spaniard opinions on South American Spanish dubs.

Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.

One of the issues is that you can't watch what you want on one paid for service.

I would happily watch my football team play on the telly if I could watch all the games for a reasonable price. However, you can't pay to watch all the games from a single service and you generally have to sign up for a prolonged period or pay significantly more than I'm willing to pay to watch the game if I've got the time.

The reality is that the value that the media companies place on watching a game on telly is significantly higher than the value I get from watching a game. I understand that others place a higher value on being able to watch a match or any other sport. I don't.

Paying hundreds of euro or pounds per season to attend a match is one thing. I accept that paying for police stewards and ambulances cost a lot of money. Paying the same to watch some games across multiple companies is of no interest to me.

Let me watch all my teams games for a tenth the cost of a season ticket and I'll probably pay.

I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.

The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.

Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.

Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.

This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.

Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!

Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.

It is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?

Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!

So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...

These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!

Good job Spain.

CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.

Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.

I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.

But cloudflare has no issue blocking the content if they receive a court order. The issue here is that La Liga wants to be able to get content blocked because they say so, and it has to be done right now.

I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.

DMCA notices (and whatever the EU equivalents are) are designed to avoid the need for court orders. Every service provider that sends content is obligated by law to cease sending the content upon receipt of that notification. CF ignores them because they believe (mistakenly in my view) that the law doesn’t apply to them.

And every time they are sued for facilitating piracy, instead of letting the case to proceed to trial, they settle out of court.

Cloudflare famously ignores DMCA themselves for content they don't host, with their point of view that since they're a proxy and not a host they are not forced to comply, only pass the DMCA claim to the upstream.

https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/abuse-approach/

Other than that, the legal situation on Spain is pretty dire for LaLiga. The Supreme Court already ruled in Spain that, as per the current writing of the law, football transmissions are _not_ works subject to copyright as they're not works of "art, literature and science": https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/ca/Poder-Judicial/Tribunal...

So it's likely that, if LaLiga sued Cloudflare or they made them party on any actual litigation, Cloudflare would defend themselves and possibly win. Therefore... they just don't sue them, only sue ISPs that have an incentive to just comply to any LaLiga request (as.. legal compliance and collaboration is one of the requirements for being able to buy rights to LaLiga matches in Spain. Yeah, no kidding, you can look it up in their public documentation).

Well, I lie. In a legal twist, they ended up suing Cloudflare for "participation in criminal activities", but not through the same avenue they sued the ISPs on (penal vs commerce court), with some interesting twists as accusations of "facilitating services to avoid the execution of a court order" - which doesn't make a lot of sense, as they're not even direct parties to that court order and they were denied taking part on it. https://okdiario.com/economia/empresas/justicia-imputa-ceo-c...

I’m aware of how they rationalize it, and it’s bullshit. They compare themselves to a router that passes through packets unmolested. But that argument is trivially refuted by the fact that their IPs are what their customers' DNS queries resolve to, and the fact that without being explicitly configured to do so, their proxies will not serve content on behalf of an origin. L3 routers simply copy packets between interfaces. A CDN is significantly more complicated than that.

There's still just bit torrent though. No need for cloudflare, no need for proxies, no tor. And it's like, easier than Netflix!

> Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!

Correction: they use the pirate excuse to make life of clients choosing competitors (like cloudflare) impossible. There is an overlap between some Cloudflare and Telefónica services.

Quick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.

So what does this mean in english?

Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.

Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN:

  Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883

TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".

I wonder how close they are in broad economic damage to it being cheaper to just pay FIFA or whomever for some kind of nationwide viewing license (which they'd surely be able to negotiate way lower than a simple "cost to view every match, times count of Spanish residents" since that's nowhere near as much as they're getting out of Spain now)

Movistar are paying a billion dollars a year, so probably a long way away

$20/yr per Spanish resident? That's very few wasted labor-hours per worker per year (on average).

No thank you, i don't watch sports, why should i pay for that crap just so a corrupt judge can get another car or sit on some board of some company when they "retire"

I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm trying to get a handle on whether Spain is on track to de facto spend more than this per resident in lost economic productivity (to say nothing of whatever value we might like to place on sheer inconvenience for residents that doesn't have measurable GDP effects). Like just paying a tiny tax and calling it a day might be less crazy than the current path, which would highlight how nuts this is precisely because that's also nuts.

The number will increase each year for sure. If all people are forced to pay, what’s to prevent them from charging 100€ a year or more?

It's La Liga - Spain should just nationalize them and make it a division of the government.

Or follow the example of the Barcelona football club and make it be owned by the fans and supporters themselves instead.

That's effectively how it was in European countries, when TV was nationalised. Then everything became about extracting as much money as possible from consumers, and here we are.

> TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare

AFAIK, I don't think it's "A LOT of CDNs", it's only Cloudflare, at least personally Cloudflare is the only CDN I can verify I lose access to during the football matches.

Main ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports. Impact on legitimate traffic is real.

It’s multiple ISPs though. A judge sentence commands them to do it. Insane, I know.

See this story from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883

Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.

This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.

Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

I wonder when businesses will start suing ISPs for the losses they incur while they're cut off from half the internet.

No one here is being "cut off from the internet" during the blocks, you grossly misunderstand what's happening here.

If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare.

As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).

Ok, I'm sorry for the hyperbole of saying "half the internet" if it's in fact 10%. But come on, that's still massive.

It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.

No need to be sorry, it is a matter of how you define the percentage. If you would define it as "fraction of traffic generated by residential/home endpoints" you probably wouldn't be off that far. Maybe because Netflix does not use cloudflare, but if you say "CDNs make more than 50% of traffic to residential" you would definitely be right

Blocking Cloudflare is not significantly different from cutting the internet depending on which part of it you need. We recently had a thread about CI jobs failing to connect to Docker from Spain during football. I personally know when there's football because saucenao stops working.

I can’t do a simple `docker pull postgres:18` every time there’s a football match on.

I once had a day (and made a Tell HN about that too) where I couldn't access 3 of the links from the HN start page (and I didn't try all of them) during a match, because of that football IP block. It might not be half the internet, but I definitely felt like living in a country with massive censorship. And to me - given that I totally do not understand how people find watching football interesting in any way - for the most incomprehensible reason.

ISPs are following the law. You want to sue the government.

Then I'm mistaken. I thought the law only demanded that piracy sites were blocked, and then ISPs made life easier for themselves by blocking all of Cloudflare.

At any rate, this behavior isn't befitting a serious country like Spain.

I'm torn on this. It should go through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it.

Spain were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.

I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that Spain don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.

Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system

Offtopic, but after clicking on this story and going to google news, my feed is flooded with all kinds of sports articles, whereas before there were none.

A grim reminder that google does track you all over the internet.

The page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?

FWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org soon.

This is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.

File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.

Hey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!

I hear la liga wants to do a prize too!

You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.

Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative?

Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really

Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around

Oh man, if there was one way to win Spaniard commie hearts for Elon is to solve sports streaming.

These people are going to make Docker (and many other infrastructure-related sites) unusable for companies in Spain. Going to be fun to watch their lobby burn down when their companies stop operating during matches.

Look, I'd be more supportive of this sort of thing if it worked - pirated futbol streams are rampant despite the blocking.

And the blast radius often is the entire devstack. Last weekend they blocked Cloudflare and GitHub simultaneously.

If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.

It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.

> but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.

Every now and then we go out to watch some of the finals for the national (Spanish) team, and the audience most of the time lean young still today in 2026, although of course it's very mixed more depending on the bar/restaurant you go to rather than the football itself. Even if the subscription prices are expensive today, affording 4 EUR for two beers during a game in a bar is affordable even to teenagers.

If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.

‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.

if they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.

That's coming. The death knell is sounding for general purpose computing in the developed world. And nothing can be done about it.

> And nothing can be done about it.

Don't give up so easily.

People won't revolt even for genocide so why would they do anything about their computers?

We'll pay the subscription and be done with it. Those who can't will suffer.

We live too comfortably and independently to risk it all for the thousands of paper-cuts eroding our lives. The capitalists learned from history: isolate us and change into the dystopia little by little and there will never be enough resistance.

GP's right in pointing that out even if it hurts to read it.

Every time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.

It doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?

Games are time-sensitive events. Most people who care don't want to watch the game once it's finished, they want to watch it live.

Time to block your gov sites as well

You can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs

Or a VPN for a tenth of the price.

"Spain to block the internet 24/7"

Please do. I want to see the result on the GDP.

Any summary in English? My translation service doesn't give good results.

This is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship.

Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.

Or somebody will put a lid on the pot.

Does not seem like a good idea to a put a lid on a heavily boiling pot...

Just how much money is in all that?

Normalized revenue for LaLiga itself in 2025 was 5.4 billion (american billion) euros

Probably not that much, but it's money of influential people, so the rest must suffer.

Just another instance of think global, act local.

Whatever can be lapped up by any given nation as an excuse, will be used as such to advocate the crackdown on that nation's right to access the information freely.

Think about children, grandma, national security, sovereignity, economy, minorities, tennis, golf, copyright, solar flares, aliens, Keter-class objects, climate change, CO₂, fill your goto excuse in.

Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?

Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.

Its football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.

From this perspective, I kind of think that expanding the bans to golf and movie releases is a good thing - orders of magnitude less people partake in either of those, and so will start to feel the pain of their internet going down too...

yikes

Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s

XKCD needs a new comic release, replacing "compiling" to "sports"...

https://xkcd.com/303/

Too bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy.

When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.

I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.

Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.

Gentle reminder that we have a gag law that subtly undermines the right to strike as well as give full and total power to police to do whatever they want if they deem your actions a "disrespect" or "disobedience" without giving explanation to anyone.

And the subsequent PSOE admins show precisely why Spain had to be a dictatorship.

It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.

I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :)

Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.

Or you can have all of those things but also not block cloudflare. Because blocking cloudflare is in the interest of just a few company's profits and is unrelated to everything else you mentioned.

Yes, sure, as mentioned, I agree with that it's fucking stupid, but when someone complains about that, while referring to "quality of life" in a place which more depends on other things, it's worth to zoom out a bit and gain some perspective, which was frankly missing in the comment I was responding to.

Nah, I didn't miss anything. I've spent enough time in the EU (including the poorer parts that most tourists don't visit) to have a crystal clear perspective on the real situation.

Yeah, no sure, generalizing "the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state" across the EU because specifically Cloudflare being unavailable in Spain for couple of hours a week is totally a nuanced, measured and accurate take and representation of how it is to live and work in the EU in 2026.

You're welcome to walk to the cafe on the other side of town... however, if you're in a larger city in the southwest, you can expect that walk to take several hours. Just driving from one edge of the Phoenix metro area to the other corner can take upwards of over an hour and a half, and our traffic isn't nearly as bad as other cities.

As for healthcare... that's a mixed bag... you can go to the ER and you will be treated, but the bill afterwards may or may not be impactful... There have been some improvements, but the healthcare lobby is massive, and pretty much stops most reasonable and some unreasonable improvements.

On public transportation, it varies... you need to realize that the main part of the US is by itself about the size of Europe... I would assume there are plenty of areas of Europe where public transit is likely limited. Not even getting into Alaska, which is by itself massive and largely unpopulated. It's probably better to compare individual US States to EU nations in terms of transit.

My last ER trip ended up over $1,000,000. Fortunately after out-of-pocket maximum it was all covered by insurance but this kind of debt would be life ending to the uninsured.

I get it... I had an ER trip, pre ACA (Obamacare) where my health insurance max was 500k, and my bill was like $370k after all was said and done... I worked a lot the next 7 years to pay off/down what I could, then at that point, I just stopped as it was off my credit score, and everyone that took reasonable payment arrangements or settled for an amount that fit in my tax return, bonus, etc.. had been paid.

I definitely couldn't handle working that much today. I've also got some serious health issues that aren't being addressed. That said, I don't feel that the US can handle socialized medicine well, and the best that we could do is take the spend that is already in place with the govt and establish a first party option to compete with commercial providers that anyone can buy a plan from. I also think that there are single-payer approaches and fiduciary requirements for insurance carriers could go a long way combined with such an approach as opposed to a whole sale socialist takeover.

Just what we need, another Rube Goldberg machine to lay over the current Rube Goldberg machine in order to avoid "socialism." Somehow a socialist army, police, and fire department work, but not healthcare, because it is special.

Well, I see lots of calls from left/socialist leaning people to abolish the police and army as it stands. How much corruption already happens in the govt across local and national programs as it stands.. do you think this would be better if it gets expanded?

Police and Fire agencies are local, not national for the most part.

Also, What would it cost to buy all the hospitals and urgent care facilities across the US? Do we just print more money for this? I mean, what would that do to inflation for the next decade as it would be greater than all the COVID spending increases by a pretty wide margin.

No it wouldn't be. If you were uninsured, the price would magically drop to $50,000. And if you couldn't pay it you'd simply file for bankruptcy and it would be socialized onto the rest of us that way. Worst case scenario, post-bankruptcy you'd have to rent a home for 7 years instead of getting a mortgage until your credit resets. But even people who have gone through bankruptcies can still get mortgages.

Yes, the US healthcare system is insane/dumb. But the stupidity of it can just be stated matter-of-factly without inventing falsehoods like "life ending $1,000,000 debt for the uninsured."

I don't think Spain has such amazing quality of life if you are not already set. It's very tough for young people. It doesn't reward hard work and education. If you have your nice house in a nice place and a good government job it's a happy place but from what I see around people, especially young productive people are not in good place here.

Spain is lucky that it gets around 20% of its economy because of nice weather (tourism + foreign real estate buyers) but I don't think it's enough to sustain the quality of life if there are no reforms.

If you think Spain it's Andalucia, Murcia and Valencia (and the archipelagos) I have bad news for you.

> I don't think Spain has such amazing quality of life if you are not already set. It's very tough for young people. It doesn't reward hard work and education

When I first came here I literally spent 2 days sleeping outside as I couldn't afford housing, and had very rough 4-5 years before I even got my first programming job. Today I'm financially independent though, and it's probably all thanks the type of environment Spain has fostered together with my own willpower, compared to the environment in the country I'm from where it'd be short of impossible to do what I did, with zero education.

I think it depends on what you compare it to. Plenty of places are way worse, and many other places are surely better. It's definitively possible to achieve amazing quality of life even if you aren't "already set", even outside of government jobs (that don't even pay that well anyways).

Thank you for your perspective. As the beginnings were tough (sleeping outside) can you briefly describe how Spain helped you along the way? From your description it sounds you got there mainly by your own resolve so I am curious why you are praising Spain.

> It's very tough for young people. It doesn't reward hard work and education.

Isn't this applicable to pretty much everywhere now?

Imo USA is much better than EU (and especially countries like Spain) on this one. I live in EU, my family (both immigrants from different countries) live in USA. I don't think it's comparable. In USA if you are somewhat smart and somewhat hard working you will do very well vast majority of the time. There are significantly more opportunities there for people who want to take them.

> never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.

I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.

In other news NY is working on banning air guns that are not transparent or brightly colored and have plugged barrels. Yes plugged, making them useless.

Which oppressive bureaucratic state are we talking about again?

You’ll take my air gun out my cold dead hands?

The USA consistently ranks outside the top 10 countries in Quality of Life by any reputable metric.

Any metric that treats the US as one single data point instead of 50 should be taken with a grain of salt. Denmark has 6 million residents, Minnesota has 5.7 million. You can't compare an entire continental nation, whose 50 states all set their own 50 different health, education and public spending policies, against e.g. Sweden or Spain. That's a bad comparison.

It’s this line of argument that gets used when health spending is compared between countries.

The US has no willingness to try move the bar and bring up the average.

I got mine!

Hm no I don't think so, my healthcare is ass and I'd love to be on the state-sponsored insurance that my wife has, for example. But if we're going to shoot for the stars, I think it's important to make truthful comparisons instead of starting from a bedrock mired in bad data, bullshit and jingoistic spite.

Why do we judge other geographically large and politically divided nations like Canada, Russia or China in aggregate but the USA gets special treatment that conveniently provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?

Because we don't and we shouldn't? Don't defend bad practice in discussing the US by inventing bad practice that people you just made up are using to discuss Canada, Russia, and China.

> provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?

You are literally insisting here that aggregate data conceals differences between groups of people. The end of your sentence angrily argues against the beginning of your sentence.

edit: the reason we need to disaggregate is because we need to talk about Mississippi. We need to talk about black America. We need to talk about Chicagoland separately from downstate Illinois. We need to talk about black Chicago separately from white Chicago. Aggregation helps us avoid things.

Edit: lol never mind, not going to bother arguing with Americans

I don't know who does this except mostly western Europeans trying to score points on the "I happened to be born in the place that has the most perks for people like me" scoreboard. If you want to compare large geographic areas, you could at least start by including Eastern Europe in these "Europe versus everyone else" comparisons, which would make things look much less flattering for Europe.

Well, there are lots of EU countries where governments aren't as idiotic as that of Spain, and where bureaucracy is mostly under control as well.

As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.

As a Swede living in Spain for over 30 years, i much prefer to stay down here. My personal feel is that the Nordic countries "nanny" their populations too much. Too much say in way you can or can't do, and the culture encourages it (O my why are they talking so loud, O my they are arguing outside in public!.... My own experiences when visiting). The governments also don't know how to deal with the ingress of immigration as well as having a extensively privatized system that does not work (healthcare, schools, transport - i think its slowly getting better). Now there are great things too... But i feel safer walking the streets of Barcelona then the streets of Malmo.

Now Spain have their own issues - there are a lot of very light leaning people around still... there was no revolution when the dictator died. A lot of judges and military police officers that had murdered people under Franco continued in service. And of course, lets not forget how the countries plays everyone against Catalunya and Pais Vasco, everything is our fault if you ask people in the south and just like i mentioned above, all we hear about is the Vox and other ultra right people talking crap.

I think one of the few good things we still have down here in Spain is that there is still a memory of Franco, of the dictatorship. If not you, then one of your parents or grandparents lived it.

Ever been in France or Germany? Our bureoucracy it's nothing against theirs.

Rage bait as it is; please stay over there in the US, I will stay here in Spain. I will live with this 'opression' that I have to read about on HN to notice. All good!

Having worked in both the US and EU, I can tell you the quality of life is vastly better in the EU.

US does have some perks for sure. But there are so many issues of its own and those issues are almost always pushed downwards to the most vulnerable groups. Which means, on average, you do end up with a better quality of life outside the US.

Conversely, most Europeans praising the USA have mostly been to California or New York, and rarely to Ohio or Alabama

The HOA, the ICE, 1984 like scans in the airports even as a tourist, lack of basic healthcare...

Yeah, you live in the paradise...

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