The Spanish LaLiga and Belgian Pro League have extended an agreement that seeks to combat audiovisual piracy of the latter’s content.
LaLiga has been providing the Pro League with tools to detect, analyse and remove illegal audiovisual content from Belgium’s top division across social networks, fake profiles, apps and websites for streaming and IPTV. The two leagues first partnered back in March 2018, with the agreement hailed as “unique” at the time.
The new deal covers the 2019-20 season and will seek to ensure the Pro League benefits from an increased amount of deleted content.
LaLiga said that some 23,652 illegal videos and more than 100 profiles were deleted from social media platforms last year, while 703 apps were removed from Google Play and the iTunes Store. More than 6,000 links to IPTV websites and 5,700 live streaming links were also deindexed from Google Search Engine.
Melcior Soler, director of LaLiga’s audiovisual department, said: “Renewing it is a guarantee that the work carried out in collaboration with the Belgian league is bearing fruit. The increase in data is a reason to keep working to defend competitions’ audiovisual value. Fighting against piracy is a priority for LaLiga and the Pro League and together we’ll continue to invest in technical tools and human resources to keep developing in this field.”
LaLiga has been active in its efforts to combat piracy and earlier this year it partnered with Denmark’s RettighedsAlliancen, an organisation dedicated to protecting creative content, to secure the first blocking injunction case concerning illegal streaming of live sports in the country.
LaLiga previously claimed another anti-piracy win by securing closure of three IPTV platforms in Brazil. According to LaLiga, the trio of websites that commercialised these illegal services were attracting over 1.5 million visits a month and had over 8,000 illegal subscribers.