Spain’s LaLiga and Movistar Plus+ have won a joint lawsuit they filed before the Commercial Court No. 9 of Barcelona which enables them to weekly block access to domains that facilitate the piracy of LaLiga content.
According to Telefónica, the operator of Movistar Plus+, the court’s ruling was dated July 25 and comes into effect today (August 8), four days before the start of the next LaLiga season. It will be in operation until the 2024/25 season and involve “dynamic blocking” since it will not be applied in a timely manner, but weekly with the new identifications of URLs, domains and IP addresses, without the need to notify the court in advance. Quoting the court ruling, Telefónica adds that this protection measure is necessary since “numerous cases of digital piracy that flagrantly affect the exploitation of their rights” are detected, through the use of “different models of piracy of audiovisual content on the internet (especially sports content)”.
Significantly, the ruling is in line with previous mechanisms announced by the Mercantile Court number 7 of Madrid on February 11, 2020 and the Mercantile Court number 6 of Barcelona on December 21, 2021.
In a related development, Movistar Plus+ has won another ruling that will result in internet access telecommunications operators in Spain having to weekly block access to domains that facilitate the piracy of audiovisual content on the Movistar Plus+ platform.
The decision, again by the Commercial Court No. 9 of Barcelona, is valid for three football seasons up to 2024/25. It will protect all the content on the Movistar Plus+ platform, as well as that of OTT services with which it has agreements.
These include DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, ATRESplayer Premium, Mitele and LaLiga Sports.
