The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and LaLiga, together against piracy

LaLiga will adapt its specialized software to combat the violation of intellectual property rights to the cultural field. This software will automate and streamline the investigation used to verify illicit downloads of web page content.

The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and LaLiga signed an agreement this Tuesday to strengthen the defense of intellectual property rights on the Internet and combat piracy in this area.

As explained by the Secretary of State for Culture, Fernando Benzo, and the president of LaLiga, Javier Tebas, in a press conference after the signing of the agreement, this agreement, which is part of the Culture Plan 2020, is a 'first action' in which the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and the National Professional Football League launch their collaboration to achieve "greater effectiveness" in the defense of intellectual property rights.

Through this agreement, LaLiga makes the software it owns available to the Ministry free of charge to combat piracy in the field of sport, adapting it to the cultural field. This is a tool that will allow the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission to improve its agility and efficiency in the investigation necessary in open procedures to defend intellectual property rights.

LaLiga will also be the one to train the technicians of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, and more specifically of the Secretariat of the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission, the department of the Ministry responsible for the administrative procedure that defends copyright on the Internet, so that they can make effective use of this tool.

Anti-piracy software

This anti-piracy software, adapted to the field of Culture, will facilitate research by identifying, describing and locating the use made by a web page in relation to the works being exploited, lucrative or not. The program makes it possible to identify the specific URLs where the works that are being reported by the rights holders are located, and to verify the violation by downloading, viewing or other means.

This computer program will automatically facilitate the identification of the owners of the pages responsible for the violation, as well as those responsible for intermediation services that provide services to websites that have an open file, including advertising or electronic payment services.

The work of identifying the owner of a website that offers cultural content illegally has so far been one of the most complex processes for the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission. With LaLiga software, these identification tasks, which now take between one and eight months depending on the case, could be resolved in 15 minutes.

Even following the guarantee procedure of the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission, the processing time for files will foreseeably be reduced by 50% compared to the current instruction time.

LaLiga will use the adaptation of this tool in its fight against piracy, an area in which it is closely involved and in which it has increased both its human and technical resources. LaLiga's work in this regard is focused on protecting the broadcast of matches, its most valuable asset, eradicating illegal content in different digital environments.