One of Europe’s major four football leagues, Spain’s LaLiga, is trying to go even harder against what is considered to be (content) piracy.
It doesn’t help that massive amounts of money are already in the football industry – LaLiga, and no doubt others, believe they can always squeeze an extra euro. Whichever way.
And, in trying to do that, they are also trying to prove that Big Tech stores (both Western and Eastern) aren’t “doing enough” to comply.
Never mind that the original accusations against Newplay, an IPTV app at the center of this case submitted by LaLiga to the European Commission in 2022 seemed flimsy at best, in technical terms.
But even that was enough for Google, Apple, and Huawei to be forced by a Spanish court to go to what are these days considered normal lengths in making sure an app that gets as much as accused of breaching copyright gets “disappeared” from top online stores.
So Newplay got deleted by all three companies.
But LaLiga is not satisfied. According to the behemoth football organization, these companies are now guilty of not engaging in “remote deletion of apps on users’ phones.” These would be versions of the app that users already had installed before they got removed from the stores.
In other words – LaLiga wants an Orwellian “hand” to reach down into people’s devices, and delete apps locally, without user consent.
And for Google, Apple, and Huawei not (yet) doing that – LaLiga is accusing them of “a crime of serious disobedience,” TorrentFreak reports. The very definition sounds very Orwellian, too.
So far, so bad. But in case anybody thinks LaLiga is pulling this particular attempt “out of their back four” (and football lovers will understand the pun) there actually is precedent.
In 2009, Amazon (in)famously not only deleted people’s ebooks from Kindle devices, but those books were none other than Orwell’s “1984” and, well – “Animal Farm.”
Never mind “who watches the watchmen” – the question is, who owns a device?
It’s not a new question, it was always present with proprietary software and the transition to “cloud storage” and centralized online services – but LaLiga’s folly here brings it up once again.
