On the one year anniversary of Italy’s Piracy Shield platform, the first results were said to be comforting, especially with regard to timeliness (30 minutes); “but it is essential to enhance the effectiveness of the action through the collaboration of all the intermediaries involved in access to illegal content on the network,” said a news release from FAPAV, Italy’s Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content Industries.
This comes at a time of growing protest against the Piracy Shield platform, including by consumer advocates, distributors, ISPs and even a board member of the Italian communications regulator AGCOM.
According to the latest AGCOM data, its Piracy Shield piracy tracking and ticketing platform has blocked more than 30,000 pirate sites over 10 months of operation so far. During that period, police recently made 11 arrests for operations that illegally distributed more than 2,500 channels of sports programming worth 250 million euros per month.
The Serie A and Serie B football leagues have confronted FAPAV, trying to understand what the next steps can be fight. Those who use pirated content can be fined from 150 up to 5 thousand euros. Those who transmit pirated content can be sent to prison for a period of between 6 months to 3 years and fined from 2,500 to 15 thousand euros.
These facts were among discussions during a meeting held between the new presidents of the Serie A League, Ezio Simonelli, and of Serie B, Paolo Bedin, together with the CEO of the Serie A League, Luigi De Siervo, and the President of the Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content Industries, Federico Bagnoli Rossi. The premise was to take stock of the effects of the new anti-piracy law and to define new actions to combat the illicit phenomenon linked to sports content.
Still a problem
“Every year the Serie A League suffers damage of over 300 million euros due to the pirate vision of its own matches. Precisely to defend the value of our competitions we were the first to field concrete and decisive actions against the phenomenon of audiovisual piracy, such as the creation of the Piracy Shield platform that allows the blocking of pirate sites in a few minutes. We must prosecute anyone who exploits the football product to make illegal profits from it, harming clubs, fans and insiders, but also demand that the authorities in charge start fining the thousands of private citizens guilty of using illegal streaming services. Only in this way could we defeat the culture of illegality that still prevails in our country,” said the CEO of the Serie A League, Luigi De Siervo.
Ezio Simonelli, President of the Serie A League, agreed: “The illegal dissemination of match content, in addition to being a crime, constitutes a direct threat to the financial stability of sports clubs and to the future of football itself, subtracting resources that could be reinvested in teams, structures and in the improvement of nurseries. We are aware of the importance of global action because we have seen that piracy is a phenomenon that knows no borders, and only a coordinated response between all international football leagues, authorities and stakeholders such as Fapav can lead to concrete and lasting results.”
Further reading
The A and B Leagues together with FAPAV relaunch against sports piracy. Press release. February 21, 2025. Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content Industries (FAPAV)
Complaints mount toward Italy’s Piracy Shield incident reporting platform. Article. January 28, 2025. by Steven Hawley. Piracy Monitor
Why it matters
“Piracy is a global problem and Italy has taken a decisive role in contrast strategies for years. In our country, according to the latest FAPAV/Ipsos data, a loss of turnover is estimated at about 2 billion euros, which implies a loss of GDP of around 821 million and a contraction of jobs of about 11,200 units,” said Federico Bagnoli Rossi, President of FAPAV. “The numbers show how piracy is still practiced today by a significant slice of the population, regardless of the direct and indirect damage that every single illegal action causes.
“The objective agreed with the two new presidents of Lega Serie A and B … is to work in full synergy to allow the platform to refine itself, responding to evolving needs and emerging challenges, in order to guarantee greater efficiency, reliability and functionality. The restrictive actions of the Police, Judiciary and AGCOM must necessarily also be accompanied by communication and awareness-raising activities, which seek to make the seriousness of the problem understood especially to the youngest group of the public, and which are proving increasingly effective and incisive, also in the light of the latest numbers,” said Mr. Bagnoli-Rossi
