LaLiga continues its crusade against piracy by accusing Cloudflare of profiting from illegal football broadcasts

Cloudflare appears in the spotlight of the latest and extensive statement from LaLiga around piracy, a document in which the technological intermediary is accused of profiting from the distribution of illegal content.

Although primarily known for its web security and performance improvement services, Cloudflare offers a broader range of tools, including CDN services, hosting, and other services such as domain name registration, proprietary DNS, web navigation recursive DNS, and VPN and anonymizing proxy services. As LaLiga has highlighted, pirates who distribute illegal audiovisual content take advantage of these services, especially proxy to anonymize the server hosting the illegal content.

This is the main reason why LaLiga, given the inaction against Cloudflare piracy, accuses the company of becoming a key gear for the existing mafias after piracy of live sporting events. “That is, given the relevance of Cloudflare in the online infrastructure, the fact that mafias use their legal services to broadcast illegal content is as if a bank robber used the same armored van of the bank for the robbery,” he explains.

To indirectly favor piracy, always according to LaLiga, Cloudflare mixes pirate websites into IP addresses shared by a multitude of domains, including illegal websites and legitimate websites, using the latter as a digital shield, which makes it impossible to act in isolation without the collaboration of said technological intermediary. This way, only Cloudflare can have a clear view and full maneuverability of the hacking activity occurring within their infrastructures.

A global battle against Cloudflare

In countries like France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Moldova and Japan audiovisual rights holders have sued Cloudflare in the Courts for their lack of collaboration to eradicate audiovisual fraud, obtaining rulings against this technological intermediary. The most recent milestone has taken place in Italy, where Cloudflare has been fined more than 14 million euros for not deactivating access to pirated content or complying with the anti-piracy law that required them to collaborate in blocking illegal content, the famous “Piracy Shield”.

Despite its business volume and the evidence of piracy detected under its infrastructure by LaLiga, the public reaction of its CEO, Matthew Prince, was incendiary on social networks: he threatened with withdrawing its services for customers in Italy, among them the International Olympic Committee (IOC), for the Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games; the Italian State, for the future offices and other planned investments in transalpine land, and Italian institutions and users, in general. This reaction from Cloudflare has gathered unanimous criticism from some of the most relevant actors in the football industry, such as Serie A, World Leagues Association, European Leagues or SROC, among others, in addition to LALIGA.

The lack of cooperation from technological intermediaries is not unanimous in the industry. As LaLiga points out, companies like Akamai, one of the technological intermediaries that are part of the ecosystem of LALIGA collaborators against piracy, positions itself in favor of competition in taking measures against piracy. “Companies with the same, or even less, technological resources as Cloudflare (…) They do cancel pirate broadcasts of live matches with the relevant reaction time "once they are notified of the crime being committed under their infrastructure," underlines the communication from LaLiga, which ends with a call to those Cloudflare clients who may suffer blocks on their websites to contact the email afectadoscloudflare@laliga.es. Once the claim is received, LaLiga will inform Cloudflare that the illegal content hosted on the IP of its website does not have its authorization.