LaLiga, the organising body of the top two divisions of Spanish club football, has claimed another win in its ongoing battle against audiovisual piracy by securing the closure of three IPTV platforms in Brazil.
LaLiga said the trio of websites that commercialised these illegal services (www.listaiptvbrasil.com.br, www.melhorlistaiptv.com.br and www.listaiptvbrasilhd.br) attracted over 1.5 million visits a month and had over 8,000 illegal subscribers.
The action is the result of collaboration with LtaHub, LaLiga’s partner legal office in Brazil. The offenders have been contacted and ordered to permanently remove LaLiga-owned audiovisual content, cease all illegal activity, hand over all devices involved in their operations and transfer the domain names. In addition, the offenders have made a commitment not to carry out any further infringements and collaborate in the efforts to identity any related illegal platforms.
The latest LaLiga-led case takes its place alongside other recent operations carried out in Brazil, which saw four highly popular streaming websites dismantled and permanently closed. These platforms registered over 43 million visits each month.
“Digital content piracy represents the most harmful form of unfair competition, claiming the fruits of the hard work put in by the millions who work in the football industry throughout the world,” LtaHub chief executive Ygor Valerio said.
“The closure of these three platforms, which had a significant following and massive potential to do damage, proves not only how important the fight against piracy is for LaLiga, but the fact that this crime has no place in Latin America.”
LaLiga has made significant investments, both in terms of human and technical resources, to deal with the issue of audiovisual piracy. In Spain alone, requests have been made to close 31 pirate websites, with 17 of these platforms now successfully shutdown.