Telefónica & LaLiga’s Anti-Piracy Collaboration Runs in Both Directions

In 2024, legal action taken by Spain's top-tier football league led to telecoms giant Telefonica disclosing the identities of alleged pirates among its own subscribers. Telefonica's cooperation was to be expected, as it just obtained the rights to broadcast LaLiga matches for 1.2 billion euros. In contrast, details of an anti-piracy agreement between the two companies, one that seems to operate in the opposite direction, wasn't expected at all.

pirate-view-card-footballAfter steadfastly protecting the privacy rights of subscribers, usually against aggressive rightsholders determined to unmask them, ISPs today are more likely to view disclosure from a different perspective.

At a time when internet subscriptions paid most of the bills, protecting customers accused of illicit file-sharing led to prolonged litigation. Cases were fought up to the highest courts in the United States. In Europe, further still.

When rights organization Promusicae sued Telefonica in 2005, demanding the identities of customers accused of using KaZaA to pirate music, Telefonica fought tooth and nail all the way to Europe’s highest court.

Telefonica argued that under Spanish law, ISPs were under no obligation to hand over customer details to rightsholders intent on civil litigation. On January 29, 2008, the Court of Justice of the European Union agreed, handing Telefonica – and its customers – a landmark win.

Laws Change, Priorities Change

Over time, legal amendments and the drive for profit rendered Telefonica’s win irrelevant. ISPs were already selling internet access alongside mobile phone contracts, live TV subscription packages, VOD services, music, and other valuable content, the vast majority of it regularly pirated online.

As a result, the past several years have seen the traditional bright lines between exclusive rightsholders and ISPs licensed distributors become increasingly blurred.

Common Interests Are the Main Focus Now

In 2024, controversial legal action by LaLiga, Spain’s top-tier football league, led to Telefonica disclosing the identities of alleged pirate subscribers, based solely on LaLiga’s allegations.

If Telefonica resisted at all during closed-door discussions on disclosure, only evidence of cooperation has seen the light of day. If that proves unpopular with a subset of customers, not much can be done. Since rival ISPs are also cooperating with LaLiga, jumping ship in protest would be completely pointless.

Disclosures are now said to take place on a rolling basis, with LaLiga supplying IP addresses and Telefonica naming names. LaLiga’s subsequent letters, sent to freshly deanonymized subscribers, contain offers to settle for a few hundred euros. Financial penalties like these are meant to act as a deterrent and a forceful reminder that LaLiga matches should be purchased from licensed distributors.

Those distributors include Movistar Plus+, a subscription digital TV platform owned by Telefónica, that currently accounts for almost half of the Spanish market. Telefonica paid 1.2 billion euros for the rights to broadcast LaLiga matches.

TV channels owned by Sony, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Comcast are also distributed through Movistar Plus+. Anti-piracy agreements between LaLiga and Movistar Plus+, and with the channel owners via the MPA, sees URLs/domains delivered to Telefonica and other ISPs, on a weekly and monthly basis, to enable effective blocking of pirate sites.

You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours

Of course, similar agreements between rightsholders ISPs are common elsewhere, although nothing quite as unusual as the arrangement detailed in a DMCA takedown notice sent to GitHub earlier this week.

While the sender’s identity isn’t 100% clear due to numerous redactions, GitHub’s report indicates Telefonica. In basic terms, the notice requests removal of an .M3U playlist which allegedly provides access to content to which Movistar owns the rights. GitHub responded as expected by disabling the repository which rendered the file inaccessible.

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In other respects the DMCA notice is both unusual and somewhat confusing. In response to the question, “Are you the copyright holder or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf?” the sender said “Yes, I am the copyright holder.”

In a notice sent by Telefonica, that’s nothing unusual, much less something to quantify in an explanatory wall of text that, if anything, seems to contradict the copyright holder declaration made earlier.

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The unlikely conclusion is that in order to protect content distributed by Movistar, to which Telefonica directly or indirectly owns the rights, the telecoms giant has entered into an anti-piracy agreement with LaLiga, Spain’s top football league. The agreement authorizes LaLiga to act on Telefonica’s behalf as follows:

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While the terms ‘monitoring’ and ‘removal’ are self-explanatory, ‘enforcement’ could apply to any number of measures, some of which are only available to exclusive rightsholders.

Nevertheless, this is an intriguing situation that could play out in unpredictable ways. Quite simply, since the ideals behind the 2008 victory are dead and buried, increasingly vulnerable pirates may like to keep that in mind.