Google, Cloudflare and X/Twitter are in their little (cleated) shoes. LaLiga, the organizer of the Spanish football championship, is pointing the finger at these companies to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). An unprecedented move to shake up the American authorities and make them face up to their responsibilities regarding the piracy of sports rights.
Google, Cloudflare and X out of the game
Each year, the USTR produces a “Special 301” report in which copyright holders — such as authorized broadcasters, software publishers, etc. — give their opinions on copyright and piracy issues in different countries. This report helps establish a list of countries to be monitored because their intellectual property policies can harm American companies.
The main objective of this report is therefore to identify foreign practices that are harmful to companies based in the United States. It serves as a basis for exerting possible commercial or diplomatic pressure to improve the protection of intellectual property abroad.
However, some foreign players are taking advantage of the opportunity to voice their grievances, and this is the case of LaLiga, which submitted its own report to the USTR a few days ago. The organization singles out several major US companies: “While not the primary focus of this submission, it is important to highlight the significant role that certain US-based intermediaries, such as Google, Cloudflare, Coredeluxe and X (formerly Twitter), have played as key enablers in the continued rise of piracy throughout 2024.”
LaLiga accuses them of providing the infrastructure necessary for pirate networks to thrive: anonymization, content delivery networks (CDNs), domain name systems, VPNs, hosting, content indexing and promotion on social networks. Unfortunately, the Spanish organization does not go into details, but it clearly has a lot on its plate!
Nevertheless, last August LaLiga had asked Google for the global deindexation, worldwide, of websites and domain names that accumulated a large number of national deindexation requests, following the provision of pirated links.
LaLiga also asks the USTR to include the United Kingdom and Germany in the "priority list" of countries where intellectual property is mistreated. Rather unexpected, because this list includes the worst countries in this area (Russia, China, etc.)! But the organizer believes that online services hosted in these two countries allow the piracy of its content.
It remains to be seen whether the USTR will listen to LaLiga's arguments, particularly with regard to Google, Cloudflare and X/Twitter, which is in the Trump administration's good books...
Source: TorrentFreak
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