Faced with warnings that the survival of top-tier football was at stake, in July lawmakers urgently signed off on tough legislation to block pirate IPTV services in Italy. On the first day of the new season this month, around 100 pirate service ‘violations’ were reportedly identified, but none were blocked. According to an inside source, Italy’s “insane” blocking system isn’t quite ready, but will “solve digital piracy” early October latest.

It’s hard to say how many times the movie, music, and more recently live sports industries have survived imminent piracy-inflicted apocalypses. They have though, possibly since those issuing the warnings usually have ideas about how to prevent them.

More often the solution lies in new legislation that allows rightsholders to do something the law currently disallows. The proposals can be radical but to a background of industry X or Y disappearing overnight with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, urgency is always part of the equation.

This June, as Italian lawmakers were preparing to pass radical IPTV blocking legislation, DAZN publicly urged lawmakers to speed up the process. DAZN reminded them that since piracy steals €800,000 from live sports every single day, live ‘dynamic’ nationwide blocking needed to be implemented without delay.

The rest of this article can be read on TorrentFreak.com

Source link