Speaking at EFE’s fifth Sport Business Day Forum event organized by the Efe News Agency and Best Option Media, Guillermo Rodriguez, head of the anti-piracy technology unit of Spain’s LaLiga announced that during the past season, the league had removed “more than 1,065,000 videos on YouTube, more than 368,000 videos on other social networks, more than 75,800 websites from Google’s search results and more than 820 mobile applications that were used to view pirated content.”
LaLiga launched a dedicated anti-piracy subsidiary, LaLiga Tech, in September of 2021, which “acts in a 360° way wherever piracy is being commercialised, distributed or promoted,” across search engines, websites, mobile apps and has collaboration agreements with than 70 social media platforms.
In addition to protecting its own programming, LaLiga Tech’s clients include other sporting competitions and federations, such as the Jupiler Pro League, the Royal Belgian Football Federation and the World Padel Tour, as well as rights holders such as Dorna Sports, Millicom or Sky Mexico.
Read the full LaLiga article, “LaLiga Tech’s milestones in the fight against piracy: 9 billion euros of assets protected and more than one million videos removed from YouTube” (June 13, 2022)
Why it matters
Quoting research from the European Union, Mr. Rodríguez said: “Piracy causes losses of more than 60 billion euros and more than 400,000 jobs in Europe every year. It is a global problem that affects all levels of society, from the competitions that own the rights to society through the taxes that are not paid, the criminal activities that are related to piracy and the impact that the job losses have.” This quoted research was published in 2018. Since then, greater financial and job loss figures have been published.
