I'm not a big sports fan but I know several people who are. I don't think there's another industry on earth whose customers are so willing and eager to spend money as fans watching their teams. And there's probably no industry on earth that tries as hard to prevent people from buying their services.
The link between piracy and hypothetical profits has never been hard science, but when it comes to televized/streaming sports, a lot of this pirating seems to happen because people aren't allowed to watch it legally in their area.
Huge swaths of Los Angeles are completely unable to watch Dodgers games on TV because of the way the cable companies have packaged and delivered the content. You know, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, makes total sense.
If I'm understanding that right then the games are available to watch legally, it's a problem self-inflicted by the customers who choose not to get the service they're available on. Because it's not their preferred service.
Are you aware that in many areas of Los Angeles, and I'm sure other areas too, you often only have a single choice of cable/phone/internet provider? So no, you couldn't be further off.
Cable companies have monopolies. For a lot of people, they couldn't even choose to pay for the cable operator who owned the station. For a long time only 30% of the market could even get the channel if they wanted to. Now it's only slightly better because theoretically one can stream it on DirecTV's stupid expensive streaming service or get it on one satellite provider but not any of the others.
Yes, the games are available to watch legally, and you have choices. You can choose to watch the game in person (seats are available or they wouldn't have a local blackout), or travel out of the area where you'll be able to watch it on TV.
Right. What's your point? Virtually all media is available for free via consequence-free piracy, but generally at the cost of quality and convenience. I don't see that ever changing. Legitimate venders can provide a better quality product. That's how you sell, you become the preferred service by offering a better version at a price the customer is both willing and able to pay.
Customers don't have a problem, they can always get a form of the media they want if they are willing to pay in price or convenience.
I think it is a problem when markets become profit driven rather than product driven.
By this, I don't mean businesses shouldn't put substantial weight on their profits, but rather that when push comes to shove you have to ask which matters more: profit or product? You will constantly be faced with some choice of sacrificing the quality of the product in favor of higher profits or sacrificing profits in favor of the product.
Certainty we want to maximize both, but this isn't always possible.
I think part of this has come through our runaway problem with shareholders and hyper fixation on the short term. Many shareholders are happy to trade product for profit because they believe they can exit during the market lag. It is statistical arbitrage. They have no interest in the long term value of a company or product, only until the time of exit.
It's worth noting that being too focused on the short term will damage the long term sustainability. Many times you have to put off profits today for profits tomorrow. That's the same problem. But there will be significant pressure against this if people driving don't care about tomorrow.
It never fails to astonish how poorly the larger sports leagues cater to their biggest fans. Local blackouts are treating your most loyal fanbase to the worst service. I shouldn't have to VPN for anything. Sports has a global audience.
Every league should offer something akin to a season ticket "firehose" (all games streamed live with hosted replays) like MLS does on Apple TV or Gallagher rugby on the Rugby Network.
This, I've given up so many times wanting to watch a soccer game and found no way to do it. It is incredibly frustrating. I don't understand how the current system works as it is impossible to figure out how to watch games.
The link between privacy and hypothetical profits has been studied by the European commission (or parliament don't remember rn). The study was hidden and revealed only later when pirate mep Felix read digged in about it
Exactly. I'm in Norway, and here, to watch the English Premier League legally, the price this latest season was over $70 per month. Keeping in mind the fact that most people will maybe watch one game(their team's game) a week, the prices are just getting absurd. There's no way to buy single games, subscribing to games for a single team, etc. To watch the 38 games your team will play last season, the only available option was to buy access to all 760 games. The company holding these rights is struggling financially, layoffs and all. Because their subscription numbers have plummeted
They've already crossed the threshold where this is no longer profitable. The next licencing deal will likely be so expensive, no Norwegian or Scandinavian company could possibly be able to turn a profit from it.
Of course, the CEO of the company has been in the media talking about how IPTV funds criminal networks and such nonsense*, calling for bans, yadda yadda. They're not listening to the market at all. Just using illegal streaming as a scapegoat. And I've decided, as long as this is how it's gonna be, they're not seeing a single dime of my money.
* I find the concept absurd. No matter where we spend our money, some of it ends up with criminals and various other despicable people, who will use it for evil. No one has the ability to prevent this. There's no reasonable expectation in current societal and economic structures for the consumer to somehow keep track of all their money once it leaves their wallet. This is no more the case for IPTV than it is when I buy a burger from some hole in the wall, which unbeknownst to me is a money laundering front. Or when I buy some chocolate and most of the money ends up with some white rich guy and not the children in Africa who harvested the cocoa. The whole argument is so intellectually dishonest and morally pathetic it pisses me off. And I don't even pay for IPTV.
Really great that European courts have created all the legal tools for authoritarian control of the internet in the future, to prevent the scourge of watching sports streaming without paying.
Before this, it was much easier for ISPs / DNS providers / VPN providers to push back against governments wanting to censor the internet because the companies wouldn't have the tools installed to do this kind of blocking. The companies can then argue it is a burden to be forced to implement the tools. That is no longer the case in Europe, and the use of these tools is likely to expand outside the sports domain.
Copyright law has always been the most powerful force on the Internet. Which is why its collision with AI companies who pirate the whole Internet is very interesting.
Copyright law struggles against information wanting to be free. You can get almost anything in contravention of it by typing the odd magic word like libgen or pirate bay or scihub. I imagine even if the French crack down on the big VPNs there will be offshore ones that ignore the French courts.
Copyright is long overdue a check but I don’t think AI is going to be what does it somehow. I can see an opportunity for copyright holders to seek retrospective damages for AIs that mimic their work.
There won't be any collision.
Some companies will get some cash, the same way that Google paid to make Google Search the default search engine and the issue will die down.
> If AI training is piracy then all art made by humans is also piracy
That would only be true if human mental impressions were “fixed media” and therefore (potentially infringing) copies ubder copyright law the way data stored in electronic media in the course of AI training is.
Is it just Europe though? Have you tried uploading something on YouTube including a remote semblance of a melody from a song? Or accessing porn in some parts of the US? And then there are the App Stores and walled gardens regulating apps, content and really every aspect of one’s digital life.
How about making access to the games fairly priced and easily accessible?
Streaming services have dramatically reduced piracy by making it way easier and way cheaper than ever before to consume content.
I don't live in Europe, but if it is like US sports, you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.
Also just more accessibility in terms of being able to pay for it. As a viewer in Canada, there was no service whatsoever that was showing the Real Madrid vs Barcelona Spanish cup final a few months ago (Copa del Rey). I had to signup on a Spanish state tv website and use a VPN to access it for free.
I would have gladly paid, but there was no opportunity.
Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem.
"Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem."
I dont watch soccer. But if you want to watch soccer with a decent exposure (national league, Champions league etc.) in some EU countries you pay easily 100 Euros. And for Europe, this is a lot!
Yes, NHL blackouts are a great example. You want to watch your home team? Great, you have to subscribe to what they refer to as your “RSN” (regional sports network, usually a regular tv channel).
But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet.
It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. So you need an old-fashioned cable package to get it. The cost becomes ridiculous, just to watch hockey.
It's entirely true. I've canceled all of my streaming services because of the fragmentation and poor quality of the apps compared to my own Plex server. A few years ago I was happy to just pay $10 or $20 a month for nearly everything I wanted to watch.
Same (though s/plex/jellyfin/g). I was a long time subscriber to CBS (now Paramount+) and many others, but I've slowly cancelled them all as their quality is utter shit, and now they've started rolling ads even at the high paid tier. Using an unmodded Chromecast w/ Google TV on a stock TV, I couldn't get Paramount+ to stream any of the newer Star Trek without falling back into a horrifically obnoxious constant shift in color tone that the internet informed me is a "feature" of their DRM to sabotage the quality if somebody is trying to record it. I was just trying to watch it, after paying for the damn service! Absolutely nothing in my setup was modded or sus in any way. Guess what, I still ended up watching it, but after cancelling their service and figuring out a way outside of their system.
The only streaming service I have left now is Netflix, which does work remarkably well, though how long they stay "ad free" remains to be seen. The first time they show me an ad, will also be the last time they show me an ad.
I probably would have moved to Jellyfin if they had an Xbox app available at the time (I see they re-launched it a month and a half ago now...) but alas, the main thing is that my media is mine to enjoy when and how I wish without needing to jump through any DRM hoops or ads or multiple services.
I still have Prime as a "bonus", though I wouldn't pay if it was removed because I only use it for The Grand Tour. Netflix was the first to go, as it was where I found the removal of content most annoying. It also decided to geoblock me on a 2019 trip to Japan: I had downloaded some shows, on my Canadian wifi, to my unrooted phone with a Canadian SIM card, with Canadian taxes paid on the subscription, and it still blocked access as soon as I was in Japan. That will never be an issue with self-hosting.
Disney+ is the one I'd like to cancel next - it's my partner's account and has just blocked her dad's access, but there's a lot of content I would need to self-host. I'm inspired to by a really annoying quirk of their app: if you put on a show, then fall asleep, reopen the app and the top choice will be "continue watching" which takes you straight back to playing where the app paused with the "are you still watching?" message. So to get back to the episode list, you need to fast forward through the entire episode and then choose "back to episode listing" in the 15 seconds before it goes to the next ep. Why the "continue watching" button doesn't just bring up the episode list is a mystery to me.
> you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.
It’s not even that. Just to watch the games for one sport and one team requires this. “Remember, next week’s game is available exclusively on ShitStreamTV.” Of course, ShitStreamTV is a Brand New Streaming Network that you’ve never heard of and need yet another subscription for. Then they can’t actually handle the traffic and crash halfway through the game. Trying to get your $24.99 back? Impossible. “Terms of Service mumble mumble blah blah.”
Not defending them or what they are doing, but if you can’t afford to watch football you always have the option of not watching it. I don’t know why this is always framed as “make it cheap or it’s right to pirate it”
In the 90s I used to download star trek episodes in the UK the night after US broadcast. They simply weren't available. It's not a cost problem - when they were eventually released in the UK I spent the modern equivalent of $20 per episode to buy on VHS.
If you're unwilling to sell it, then someone else will.
Behind all these reasonably priced or easily accessible arguments for digital goods is the plain threat "Give it to me on my terms or else I simply take it for free"
This goes well beyond just an affordability issue. They’re price gouging, forcing customers into one-off subscription services that are deliberately hard to cancel and make it difficult to get a refund, even when one is clearly warranted.
They want people to pay to watch, and that’s fair. But if they make it too difficult, too expensive, or outright exploitative, they should fully expect that people will find ways to watch without paying them directly.
Interesting isn't it, everyone heres favourite vpn doesn't make the list. The one vpn that seems to tick every box that you could want, suspiciously absent.
Which one would that be? Astrill. I think Astrill is definitely one of the best. The app is top-notch, tons of international servers, works even with GFC. But it is very expensive.
mullvad vpn is double the price of AirVPN. And Astrill is double the price of mullvad vpn.
I'm not sure I trust any VPNs but for the stuff I use if for I'm not really bothered - random US news sites saying not available in Europe, the cafe blocking The Onion because it's naughty etc.
VPNs are cool but governments are always stronger.
There's no good outcome if people don't fight for their internet freedom. In Russia the providers block OpenVPN and wireguard already. In China it's probably so much worse
I don't like watching sports on TV but it's hilarious that the courts said that you are forbidden to go to aliezstream.pro, and that Mullvad is not on the forbidden list. You MUST NOT combine both because it's very naugthy!
Meanwhile Facebook stole all the books on the planet and it's not forbidden at all. It's very hard for me to take them seriously.
Does double VPN get around these kind of blocks? My understanding is the VPNs are expected to block the websites for french users, but it sounds like people could use VPN #1 to appear as a non-french user to VPN #2. VPN #2 can then allow the user to access the blocked websites, because the law only applies to french users.
Just use a VPN that's not on the list. It is also will be useful to learn other ways to get around internet censorship which people use in the countries like China and Russia
Is there some reason they wouldn't just use a VPN that isn't in France and therefore isn't subject to laws in France? There have to be VPNs in some other jurisdiction.
I don't think e.g. NordVPN has any offices in France, but in theory the French authorities could tell French ISPs to block access to nordvpn.com (and all other Nord domains), though I'm not sure if the law applies to "secondary services" (instead of ordering ISPs to block domains that offer pirated sports streams, they'd be told to block domains that offer a service to circumvent the block).
I believe Russia is doing it like this, trying to connect to a VPN provider's website will fail - interestingly NordVPN's app uses SSO to login, so blocking their main site would block the app's ability to log in.
Every VPS provider is "a service to circumvent the block" because you can configure one as a VPN in around 30 seconds, and these are all just legitimate foreign companies many of which use Cloudflare or other shared IP services for their own websites. Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks? You've gone from blocking a couple of pirate sites to blocking >95% of the internet.
> Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks
*French shrug*
I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users. At the moment a French resident wanting to watch these games without paying can just install VPN, connect to it, and watch the pirate streams. If the VPN providers are forced to comply, having a VPS is still a viable option, but for a casual user it's complicated enough that it might be enough to significantly reduce the number of pirate-stream watchers.
Then again, because of Internet censorship in e.g. China, Iran and Russia, there are several services designed for a 1-click install of a personal VPN on a VPS...
> I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users.
This is always the excuse, but how does that ever work? People want to be able to do it, technical people know how to do it, non-technical people ask them to do it for them. If the number of non-technical people is large, a single one the technical people will make a one-click installer to automate it so they don't have to keep doing it manually for people, and then the inconvenience is gone for everyone.
The companies peddling this stuff are desperate to rationalize that it can do any good. A million games will have DRM and their customers will hate it and they'll collectively lose billions of dollars by inconveniencing legitimate customers or have people pirating their stuff out of spite when they would have actually bought it. Then some game doesn't get cracked for a while because it's a statistical anomaly or it's just not very popular and nobody bothers and they get to congratulating themselves without ever considering how many of the people who didn't pirate that game actually bought it instead of just pirating a different one, or if the number of people who bought it is smaller than the number of sales they lost through destruction of goodwill -- for not only that game but also all the games that were cracked right away.
And then they double down with this kind of website blocking overreach where they're unapologetically causing collateral damage to innocent people as if to demonstrate just how little they care about anything but the dubious pretense that it was worth it.
I think it's more likely they put pressure on Visa, Mastercard and French banks. If their choice is severing the relationship with Nord VPN versus the entirety of France, they'll choose the former. Losing Visa access would be very bad for Nord's business, so I think they'd rather comply.
The VPN provider could obviously just accept cryptocurrency from users in France, so is the theory that France is going to threaten Visa with not accepting Visa anywhere in France if Visa doesn't block foreign VPN providers in foreign countries from accepting Visa from foreign users? How would even that be effective, since you would only need one VPN service to choose "stop accepting Visa"?
Does this mean a VPN company that doesn't have a legal nexus in France, or just a VPN provider that lets you use VPN servers not in France? If the latter, I do that anyway to watch region-locked cycling, frequently connecting to SBS in Australia, but also sometimes different European countries where streaming is (has been in the past) free.
La Liga has such pull in Spain, they literally cripple the internet when games are going on so people can't pirate. This is because the VPN companies refused to comply.
When these VPN providers comply with these court orders, do they only implement blocking at the DNS level? Couldn't you still use these VPNs, but use a DNS provider that isn't censored?
Most likely they will be forced to implement IP level firewall rules. IE: Traffic from French users is not allowed to go to <list of destination IPs>. This is one of the things the local ISPs already have to do.
It seems that the list of destination IPs would then be determined by whatever the domains listed resolve to (I assume). Since it's trivial to update DNS records, I wonder if they could lead to automated blocking of whatever IP those domains point to.
With that in place, I wonder if that could ever be abused by these pirate sites. Imagine temporarily pointing your pirate site domain name at a valid IP address. When you do that, in theory ISPs (and now VPNs) would automatically block perfectly valid IPs.
This would only happen if the owners of the pirate site domains actually try to do something malicious like that, but I know there are instances in the past of ISPs blocking cloudflare IPs (which is a separate issue, but the scenario I just made up reminds me of it).
That's called domain fronting. CDNs already switch between virtual hosts with headers on HTTP requests and HTTPS TLS SNI, so this even passively happen sometimes.
Now, HTTP headers and SNI are both unencrypted, so oppressive governments abuse these. Obvious fix is to make'em encrypted by enforcing HTTPS everywhere and upgrading SNI to ESNI with DoH-obtained per-server public keys.
Some of offensive side fixes to the defensive side fix are: blocking ESNI, blocking DoH, forcing use of MITM proxy, just blaming strawman terrorist groups for having to block affected IPs. etc.
Couldn't a VPN provider just start updating their DNS entries to respond with IPs of the French government around the time the block goes into place? So the ISPs would be forced to block access to the French government websites?
Now worries, the US will try again to force Switzerland to change its copyright laws so we can no longer legally download movies. /s
All this to protect some industry that is falling appart because they can't produce decent films or music anymore. Everything is calculated for profit and creativity is out the door. Meanwhile the small actual talented creators aren't protected and ripped off by the same industry that wants all the protections.
One is, you want to install Linux on your PS5. A PS5 is basically just a PC, so what are you getting out of that when you could much more easily just install Linux on a normal PC? The incentive to find a way to do it is low. Meanwhile the PS5 is manufactured by a company that doesn't want you to do it, so they make it take effort to do it.
The other is, people want to watch sports. Huge incentive. And they can use any device or service they want, not just one made by an adversarial company. Preventing this is basically having an effective censorship apparatus. The internet is an effective anti-censorship apparatus, because it connects everybody to everybody, and any single path through the network is enough to defeat censorship.
"We'll just block this path they're using over here" is like installing a single fence post in the middle of the ocean. Or worse than that, because that single fence post causes collateral damage to random innocent people (e.g. blocking Cloudflare IPs) which then gives those innocent third parties the incentive to start developing better anti-censorship tech.
He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.
Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.
iPhones have always been able to access web pages. Web pages run on general purpose computers, and basically have to, because they're made of site-specific content and site-specific code. To get rid of "piracy" you would not only need to prevent users from having access to their own phones, you would need to make it impossible for anybody to have their own web page.
That level of dystopia is the sort of thing that could never last very long because enough people would rather burn it to the ground while still inside of it than allow it to continue to exist.
when you try to connect to some commercial streaming websites in France, you already have to upload your ID, film yourself with your camera, and enable biometrics, as the government forced them to do that "to protect children" (even as they're in the middle of a scandal about silencing children when things went south in some institutions up to 20 years ago).
last time I checked, China didn't force users to give in their IDs and turn on webcams to authenticate themselves on the internet.
France does.
dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
> dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
Isn't the entire premise here that people are instead using pirate services that presumably don't require you to upload your ID and film yourself with a camera?
I'm not a big sports fan but I know several people who are. I don't think there's another industry on earth whose customers are so willing and eager to spend money as fans watching their teams. And there's probably no industry on earth that tries as hard to prevent people from buying their services.
The link between piracy and hypothetical profits has never been hard science, but when it comes to televized/streaming sports, a lot of this pirating seems to happen because people aren't allowed to watch it legally in their area.
This is a self-inflicted problem.
Huge swaths of Los Angeles are completely unable to watch Dodgers games on TV because of the way the cable companies have packaged and delivered the content. You know, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, makes total sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_blackout...
It's not even just this - some areas only offer spectrum, other areas cox, etc. And your provider may not get all or any of the games.
What do you mean, the cable companies block Dodger games from being on cable? That doesn't make sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(broadcasting)
If I'm understanding that right then the games are available to watch legally, it's a problem self-inflicted by the customers who choose not to get the service they're available on. Because it's not their preferred service.
Are you aware that in many areas of Los Angeles, and I'm sure other areas too, you often only have a single choice of cable/phone/internet provider? So no, you couldn't be further off.
Cable companies have monopolies. For a lot of people, they couldn't even choose to pay for the cable operator who owned the station. For a long time only 30% of the market could even get the channel if they wanted to. Now it's only slightly better because theoretically one can stream it on DirecTV's stupid expensive streaming service or get it on one satellite provider but not any of the others.
Yes, the games are available to watch legally, and you have choices. You can choose to watch the game in person (seats are available or they wouldn't have a local blackout), or travel out of the area where you'll be able to watch it on TV.
Spoken truly like someone who's never wanted to follow their favorite sports team in their life.
> Because it's not their preferred service.
Right. What's your point? Virtually all media is available for free via consequence-free piracy, but generally at the cost of quality and convenience. I don't see that ever changing. Legitimate venders can provide a better quality product. That's how you sell, you become the preferred service by offering a better version at a price the customer is both willing and able to pay.
Customers don't have a problem, they can always get a form of the media they want if they are willing to pay in price or convenience.
it does make sense if certain companies pays certain money that prevent other companies buying the same services
aka Exclusivity right
By this, I don't mean businesses shouldn't put substantial weight on their profits, but rather that when push comes to shove you have to ask which matters more: profit or product? You will constantly be faced with some choice of sacrificing the quality of the product in favor of higher profits or sacrificing profits in favor of the product.
Certainty we want to maximize both, but this isn't always possible.
I think part of this has come through our runaway problem with shareholders and hyper fixation on the short term. Many shareholders are happy to trade product for profit because they believe they can exit during the market lag. It is statistical arbitrage. They have no interest in the long term value of a company or product, only until the time of exit.
It's worth noting that being too focused on the short term will damage the long term sustainability. Many times you have to put off profits today for profits tomorrow. That's the same problem. But there will be significant pressure against this if people driving don't care about tomorrow.
It never fails to astonish how poorly the larger sports leagues cater to their biggest fans. Local blackouts are treating your most loyal fanbase to the worst service. I shouldn't have to VPN for anything. Sports has a global audience.
Every league should offer something akin to a season ticket "firehose" (all games streamed live with hosted replays) like MLS does on Apple TV or Gallagher rugby on the Rugby Network.
This, I've given up so many times wanting to watch a soccer game and found no way to do it. It is incredibly frustrating. I don't understand how the current system works as it is impossible to figure out how to watch games.
The link between privacy and hypothetical profits has been studied by the European commission (or parliament don't remember rn). The study was hidden and revealed only later when pirate mep Felix read digged in about it
Exactly. I'm in Norway, and here, to watch the English Premier League legally, the price this latest season was over $70 per month. Keeping in mind the fact that most people will maybe watch one game(their team's game) a week, the prices are just getting absurd. There's no way to buy single games, subscribing to games for a single team, etc. To watch the 38 games your team will play last season, the only available option was to buy access to all 760 games. The company holding these rights is struggling financially, layoffs and all. Because their subscription numbers have plummeted
They've already crossed the threshold where this is no longer profitable. The next licencing deal will likely be so expensive, no Norwegian or Scandinavian company could possibly be able to turn a profit from it.
Of course, the CEO of the company has been in the media talking about how IPTV funds criminal networks and such nonsense*, calling for bans, yadda yadda. They're not listening to the market at all. Just using illegal streaming as a scapegoat. And I've decided, as long as this is how it's gonna be, they're not seeing a single dime of my money.
* I find the concept absurd. No matter where we spend our money, some of it ends up with criminals and various other despicable people, who will use it for evil. No one has the ability to prevent this. There's no reasonable expectation in current societal and economic structures for the consumer to somehow keep track of all their money once it leaves their wallet. This is no more the case for IPTV than it is when I buy a burger from some hole in the wall, which unbeknownst to me is a money laundering front. Or when I buy some chocolate and most of the money ends up with some white rich guy and not the children in Africa who harvested the cocoa. The whole argument is so intellectually dishonest and morally pathetic it pisses me off. And I don't even pay for IPTV.
Really great that European courts have created all the legal tools for authoritarian control of the internet in the future, to prevent the scourge of watching sports streaming without paying.
Before this, it was much easier for ISPs / DNS providers / VPN providers to push back against governments wanting to censor the internet because the companies wouldn't have the tools installed to do this kind of blocking. The companies can then argue it is a burden to be forced to implement the tools. That is no longer the case in Europe, and the use of these tools is likely to expand outside the sports domain.
Copyright law has always been the most powerful force on the Internet. Which is why its collision with AI companies who pirate the whole Internet is very interesting.
Copyright law struggles against information wanting to be free. You can get almost anything in contravention of it by typing the odd magic word like libgen or pirate bay or scihub. I imagine even if the French crack down on the big VPNs there will be offshore ones that ignore the French courts.
when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object
One must only imagine the outcome.
The already rich get richer and more powerful
Copyright is long overdue a check but I don’t think AI is going to be what does it somehow. I can see an opportunity for copyright holders to seek retrospective damages for AIs that mimic their work.
There won't be any collision. Some companies will get some cash, the same way that Google paid to make Google Search the default search engine and the issue will die down.
Collusion one might say.
If AI training is piracy then all art made by humans is also piracy... we cannot create anything without drawing inspiration from something else.
The question is exactly how much is copied, and how obvious it is.
> If AI training is piracy then all art made by humans is also piracy
That would only be true if human mental impressions were “fixed media” and therefore (potentially infringing) copies ubder copyright law the way data stored in electronic media in the course of AI training is.
The law can be different between humans and machines!
Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't make sense, but either way the law can do it. The law doesn't have to follow first principles.
No because fair use is for humans not machines
> If AI training is piracy
If it is not, can I install a pirated Windows or Offiice version ? (I use it to train "AI")
Is it just Europe though? Have you tried uploading something on YouTube including a remote semblance of a melody from a song? Or accessing porn in some parts of the US? And then there are the App Stores and walled gardens regulating apps, content and really every aspect of one’s digital life.
How about making access to the games fairly priced and easily accessible?
Streaming services have dramatically reduced piracy by making it way easier and way cheaper than ever before to consume content.
I don't live in Europe, but if it is like US sports, you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.
Also just more accessibility in terms of being able to pay for it. As a viewer in Canada, there was no service whatsoever that was showing the Real Madrid vs Barcelona Spanish cup final a few months ago (Copa del Rey). I had to signup on a Spanish state tv website and use a VPN to access it for free.
I would have gladly paid, but there was no opportunity.
Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem.
"Content fragmentation and some sports rights not being bought and resold by anyone is also a big problem."
I dont watch soccer. But if you want to watch soccer with a decent exposure (national league, Champions league etc.) in some EU countries you pay easily 100 Euros. And for Europe, this is a lot!
Yes, NHL blackouts are a great example. You want to watch your home team? Great, you have to subscribe to what they refer to as your “RSN” (regional sports network, usually a regular tv channel).
But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet.
It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. So you need an old-fashioned cable package to get it. The cost becomes ridiculous, just to watch hockey.
I'm so glad Diamond Sports Group imploded from their excessive debt load and now Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers are available on Victory+ for free.
I still believe Gabe Newell was right when he said that piracy is a service problem. This case doesn't seem to be any different.
It's entirely true. I've canceled all of my streaming services because of the fragmentation and poor quality of the apps compared to my own Plex server. A few years ago I was happy to just pay $10 or $20 a month for nearly everything I wanted to watch.
Same (though s/plex/jellyfin/g). I was a long time subscriber to CBS (now Paramount+) and many others, but I've slowly cancelled them all as their quality is utter shit, and now they've started rolling ads even at the high paid tier. Using an unmodded Chromecast w/ Google TV on a stock TV, I couldn't get Paramount+ to stream any of the newer Star Trek without falling back into a horrifically obnoxious constant shift in color tone that the internet informed me is a "feature" of their DRM to sabotage the quality if somebody is trying to record it. I was just trying to watch it, after paying for the damn service! Absolutely nothing in my setup was modded or sus in any way. Guess what, I still ended up watching it, but after cancelling their service and figuring out a way outside of their system.
The only streaming service I have left now is Netflix, which does work remarkably well, though how long they stay "ad free" remains to be seen. The first time they show me an ad, will also be the last time they show me an ad.
I probably would have moved to Jellyfin if they had an Xbox app available at the time (I see they re-launched it a month and a half ago now...) but alas, the main thing is that my media is mine to enjoy when and how I wish without needing to jump through any DRM hoops or ads or multiple services.
I still have Prime as a "bonus", though I wouldn't pay if it was removed because I only use it for The Grand Tour. Netflix was the first to go, as it was where I found the removal of content most annoying. It also decided to geoblock me on a 2019 trip to Japan: I had downloaded some shows, on my Canadian wifi, to my unrooted phone with a Canadian SIM card, with Canadian taxes paid on the subscription, and it still blocked access as soon as I was in Japan. That will never be an issue with self-hosting.
Disney+ is the one I'd like to cancel next - it's my partner's account and has just blocked her dad's access, but there's a lot of content I would need to self-host. I'm inspired to by a really annoying quirk of their app: if you put on a show, then fall asleep, reopen the app and the top choice will be "continue watching" which takes you straight back to playing where the app paused with the "are you still watching?" message. So to get back to the episode list, you need to fast forward through the entire episode and then choose "back to episode listing" in the 15 seconds before it goes to the next ep. Why the "continue watching" button doesn't just bring up the episode list is a mystery to me.
> you need to jump through hoops, pay through the nose, and have 14 different accounts to watch all the sports you want.
It’s not even that. Just to watch the games for one sport and one team requires this. “Remember, next week’s game is available exclusively on ShitStreamTV.” Of course, ShitStreamTV is a Brand New Streaming Network that you’ve never heard of and need yet another subscription for. Then they can’t actually handle the traffic and crash halfway through the game. Trying to get your $24.99 back? Impossible. “Terms of Service mumble mumble blah blah.”
That’s what it’s like in the UK now. Legal streaming is much more complicated than satellite back in the day.
As a consequence people have gone back to illegal streams where you can find all the sports on one menu.
Not defending them or what they are doing, but if you can’t afford to watch football you always have the option of not watching it. I don’t know why this is always framed as “make it cheap or it’s right to pirate it”
In the 90s I used to download star trek episodes in the UK the night after US broadcast. They simply weren't available. It's not a cost problem - when they were eventually released in the UK I spent the modern equivalent of $20 per episode to buy on VHS.
If you're unwilling to sell it, then someone else will.
Still happening in 2025. :/
One well-known US show started airing the current season in the UK (on a streaming service) — 7 weeks after it started airing in the US.
Exactly right.
Behind all these reasonably priced or easily accessible arguments for digital goods is the plain threat "Give it to me on my terms or else I simply take it for free"
This goes well beyond just an affordability issue. They’re price gouging, forcing customers into one-off subscription services that are deliberately hard to cancel and make it difficult to get a refund, even when one is clearly warranted.
They want people to pay to watch, and that’s fair. But if they make it too difficult, too expensive, or outright exploitative, they should fully expect that people will find ways to watch without paying them directly.
People here are very fond of Mullhad VPN. I have mixed experiences with NordVPN, especially under Linux.
If you look for something cheap, AirVPN hast a sale going on: https://airvpn.org/ It works okay for me or my current needs.
https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy/vpn-services/
I've been an AirVPN customer for years and really no complaints. They aren't the most flashy or advertised but have never failed me!
Interesting isn't it, everyone heres favourite vpn doesn't make the list. The one vpn that seems to tick every box that you could want, suspiciously absent.
Which one would that be? Astrill. I think Astrill is definitely one of the best. The app is top-notch, tons of international servers, works even with GFC. But it is very expensive.
mullvad vpn is double the price of AirVPN. And Astrill is double the price of mullvad vpn.
If you want a free vpn, veepn is pretty good.
Can't ever trust a free VPN. If it's free, then you are the product being sold!
I'm not sure I trust any VPNs but for the stuff I use if for I'm not really bothered - random US news sites saying not available in Europe, the cafe blocking The Onion because it's naughty etc.
VPNs are cool but governments are always stronger.
There's no good outcome if people don't fight for their internet freedom. In Russia the providers block OpenVPN and wireguard already. In China it's probably so much worse
I don't like watching sports on TV but it's hilarious that the courts said that you are forbidden to go to aliezstream.pro, and that Mullvad is not on the forbidden list. You MUST NOT combine both because it's very naugthy!
Meanwhile Facebook stole all the books on the planet and it's not forbidden at all. It's very hard for me to take them seriously.
Does double VPN get around these kind of blocks? My understanding is the VPNs are expected to block the websites for french users, but it sounds like people could use VPN #1 to appear as a non-french user to VPN #2. VPN #2 can then allow the user to access the blocked websites, because the law only applies to french users.
this isn't explicitly stated but from context I understand that this is just DNS block.
so using vpn provider with some other DNS provider should be enough
there is also tor that is free and cannot be controlled in this way
Just use a VPN that's not on the list. It is also will be useful to learn other ways to get around internet censorship which people use in the countries like China and Russia
Is there some reason they wouldn't just use a VPN that isn't in France and therefore isn't subject to laws in France? There have to be VPNs in some other jurisdiction.
I don't think e.g. NordVPN has any offices in France, but in theory the French authorities could tell French ISPs to block access to nordvpn.com (and all other Nord domains), though I'm not sure if the law applies to "secondary services" (instead of ordering ISPs to block domains that offer pirated sports streams, they'd be told to block domains that offer a service to circumvent the block).
I believe Russia is doing it like this, trying to connect to a VPN provider's website will fail - interestingly NordVPN's app uses SSO to login, so blocking their main site would block the app's ability to log in.
Every VPS provider is "a service to circumvent the block" because you can configure one as a VPN in around 30 seconds, and these are all just legitimate foreign companies many of which use Cloudflare or other shared IP services for their own websites. Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks? You've gone from blocking a couple of pirate sites to blocking >95% of the internet.
> Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks
*French shrug*
I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users. At the moment a French resident wanting to watch these games without paying can just install VPN, connect to it, and watch the pirate streams. If the VPN providers are forced to comply, having a VPS is still a viable option, but for a casual user it's complicated enough that it might be enough to significantly reduce the number of pirate-stream watchers.
Then again, because of Internet censorship in e.g. China, Iran and Russia, there are several services designed for a 1-click install of a personal VPN on a VPS...
> I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users.
This is always the excuse, but how does that ever work? People want to be able to do it, technical people know how to do it, non-technical people ask them to do it for them. If the number of non-technical people is large, a single one the technical people will make a one-click installer to automate it so they don't have to keep doing it manually for people, and then the inconvenience is gone for everyone.
The companies peddling this stuff are desperate to rationalize that it can do any good. A million games will have DRM and their customers will hate it and they'll collectively lose billions of dollars by inconveniencing legitimate customers or have people pirating their stuff out of spite when they would have actually bought it. Then some game doesn't get cracked for a while because it's a statistical anomaly or it's just not very popular and nobody bothers and they get to congratulating themselves without ever considering how many of the people who didn't pirate that game actually bought it instead of just pirating a different one, or if the number of people who bought it is smaller than the number of sales they lost through destruction of goodwill -- for not only that game but also all the games that were cracked right away.
And then they double down with this kind of website blocking overreach where they're unapologetically causing collateral damage to innocent people as if to demonstrate just how little they care about anything but the dubious pretense that it was worth it.
I think it's more likely they put pressure on Visa, Mastercard and French banks. If their choice is severing the relationship with Nord VPN versus the entirety of France, they'll choose the former. Losing Visa access would be very bad for Nord's business, so I think they'd rather comply.
The VPN provider could obviously just accept cryptocurrency from users in France, so is the theory that France is going to threaten Visa with not accepting Visa anywhere in France if Visa doesn't block foreign VPN providers in foreign countries from accepting Visa from foreign users? How would even that be effective, since you would only need one VPN service to choose "stop accepting Visa"?
Does this mean a VPN company that doesn't have a legal nexus in France, or just a VPN provider that lets you use VPN servers not in France? If the latter, I do that anyway to watch region-locked cycling, frequently connecting to SBS in Australia, but also sometimes different European countries where streaming is (has been in the past) free.
I believe that's similar to what was done in Spain (for quite some time).
https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2025/02/19/cloudflare-takes-...
(Article from 2025, but last year it was already happening here)
La Liga has such pull in Spain, they literally cripple the internet when games are going on so people can't pirate. This is because the VPN companies refused to comply.
Thanks, I was looking for a list of pirated sports broadcasts.
When these VPN providers comply with these court orders, do they only implement blocking at the DNS level? Couldn't you still use these VPNs, but use a DNS provider that isn't censored?
Most likely they will be forced to implement IP level firewall rules. IE: Traffic from French users is not allowed to go to <list of destination IPs>. This is one of the things the local ISPs already have to do.
It seems that the list of destination IPs would then be determined by whatever the domains listed resolve to (I assume). Since it's trivial to update DNS records, I wonder if they could lead to automated blocking of whatever IP those domains point to.
With that in place, I wonder if that could ever be abused by these pirate sites. Imagine temporarily pointing your pirate site domain name at a valid IP address. When you do that, in theory ISPs (and now VPNs) would automatically block perfectly valid IPs.
This would only happen if the owners of the pirate site domains actually try to do something malicious like that, but I know there are instances in the past of ISPs blocking cloudflare IPs (which is a separate issue, but the scenario I just made up reminds me of it).
That's called domain fronting. CDNs already switch between virtual hosts with headers on HTTP requests and HTTPS TLS SNI, so this even passively happen sometimes.
Now, HTTP headers and SNI are both unencrypted, so oppressive governments abuse these. Obvious fix is to make'em encrypted by enforcing HTTPS everywhere and upgrading SNI to ESNI with DoH-obtained per-server public keys.
Some of offensive side fixes to the defensive side fix are: blocking ESNI, blocking DoH, forcing use of MITM proxy, just blaming strawman terrorist groups for having to block affected IPs. etc.
Couldn't a VPN provider just start updating their DNS entries to respond with IPs of the French government around the time the block goes into place? So the ISPs would be forced to block access to the French government websites?
If they wanted to troll better they'd point them at the websites of the official streaming service.
Yeah, good point. That could work as well.
Won’t many be behind cloudflare’s IP?
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I assume it will be implemented on DNS level and yeah it is possible to use a different DNS.
They will have to confirm it in a Swiss court if they want ProtonVPN to comply.
Now worries, the US will try again to force Switzerland to change its copyright laws so we can no longer legally download movies. /s
All this to protect some industry that is falling appart because they can't produce decent films or music anymore. Everything is calculated for profit and creativity is out the door. Meanwhile the small actual talented creators aren't protected and ripped off by the same industry that wants all the protections.
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French leaders are lunatics though, they didn’t file to Dubai for Telegram…
People tend to assume workarounds will be found. They will -- no doubt.
But in time, it will be as easy as installing Linux on a PS5.
I just hope unverified operating systems won't be blocked on similar grounds.
You're talking about two different things.
One is, you want to install Linux on your PS5. A PS5 is basically just a PC, so what are you getting out of that when you could much more easily just install Linux on a normal PC? The incentive to find a way to do it is low. Meanwhile the PS5 is manufactured by a company that doesn't want you to do it, so they make it take effort to do it.
The other is, people want to watch sports. Huge incentive. And they can use any device or service they want, not just one made by an adversarial company. Preventing this is basically having an effective censorship apparatus. The internet is an effective anti-censorship apparatus, because it connects everybody to everybody, and any single path through the network is enough to defeat censorship.
"We'll just block this path they're using over here" is like installing a single fence post in the middle of the ocean. Or worse than that, because that single fence post causes collateral damage to random innocent people (e.g. blocking Cloudflare IPs) which then gives those innocent third parties the incentive to start developing better anti-censorship tech.
> You're talking about two different things.
No, you've actually missed his point entirely.
He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.
Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.
Piracy effectively ends at that point.
iPhones have always been able to access web pages. Web pages run on general purpose computers, and basically have to, because they're made of site-specific content and site-specific code. To get rid of "piracy" you would not only need to prevent users from having access to their own phones, you would need to make it impossible for anybody to have their own web page.
That level of dystopia is the sort of thing that could never last very long because enough people would rather burn it to the ground while still inside of it than allow it to continue to exist.
when you try to connect to some commercial streaming websites in France, you already have to upload your ID, film yourself with your camera, and enable biometrics, as the government forced them to do that "to protect children" (even as they're in the middle of a scandal about silencing children when things went south in some institutions up to 20 years ago).
last time I checked, China didn't force users to give in their IDs and turn on webcams to authenticate themselves on the internet. France does.
dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
> dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
Isn't the entire premise here that people are instead using pirate services that presumably don't require you to upload your ID and film yourself with a camera?
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