Sept 22, 2025
In Spain, internet blocking in support of preventing the pirating of soccer video streams is getting out of hand.
https://reclaimthenet.org/laligas-anti-piracy-crackdown-triggers-widespread-internet-disruptions
LaLiga is the main soccer league in Spain, and they have been complaining bitterly about video piracy. Spain has now approved rapid-action IP-address-blocking rules. But according to reclaimthenet.org, the blocking process "flags entire IP ranges, many of which are shared by thousands of unrelated domains"
It is not clear if this applies to residential IP-address ranges; ie that your IP access would be blocked because your neighbor was streaming. But what is pretty clearly happening is that if one IP address owned by Cloudflare is streaming, it is blocked, but Cloudflare is likely offering up a number of other services (thousands, perhaps) from that same IP address. Amazon, Vercel and Github do the same. IP-address blocking, in other words, is a very crude tool.
A partial list of blocks is at hayahora.futbol/#estado.
The SOPA/PIPA laws proposed in the US also would have permitted IP-address blocking.
Here are some issues:
While we're on the subject, what about sci-hub.se and libgen.is? These offer up copyrighted content. How severely should these be blocked?
In the US, big AI firms have been strongly criticized by some for using copyrighted content as training data for LLM models. For example, the New York Times articles database has apparently been so used, as have large numbers of books from libgen.is.
In this case, at least, there is a reasonable argument that this is Fair Use. It's a bit like having a person read some articles or a book, and absorbing some of the style. That would appear to be fair use, but what about when this is done on an industrial scale?
Cases
DMCA
Privacy