Anybody who knows anything about Italian football is unlikely to disagree that it is a unique “world treasure” – but also one facing major problems, and for a while.
On the financial side, it’s the inability of the top league, Serie A, to keep up with other European giants in terms of investment, sponsorships, and above all, TV rights money.
How curious then – or let’s say, strange – that the legislative efforts aren’t focusing on fixing these fundamental issues, but are now pressing even harder to supposedly protect Serie A by further clamping down on – piracy?
Looks like it’s simply an attempt to protect copyright holders through radical measures – football be damned. Instead of addressing the real issues, and the dismal (technical) quality of the official broadcasts provided by the TV rights holder for the Italian market over the past couple of years, we are now looking at an attempt to “make better” the already abysmal 2023 law supposed to solve the IPTV problem.
Since that has not happened, changes have been made to this existing piece of legislation, known as “Piracy Shield,” implemented by the country’s communications regulator Agcom. Now the thinking is to expand the existing site blocking to DNS, VPNs, search engines, reverse proxy servers, etc., even when those providers are located outside of Italy.
Now these amendments have been accepted, the service providers will be under obligation to flag and report these providers for blocking, while failure, or delayed reaction, could result in jail time for those responsible.
The previous legislation is supposed to affect illegal streaming of live events, and involves an automated system – how else is Agcom supposed to react within 30 minutes of receiving a report about TV shows, sports, and music events?
The automation of such requests, as well as “overreporting,” has been plaguing AGCOM’s ability to live up to the task it has been entrusted with and has by and large failed thus far.
Pity the Italian authorities don’t care about football itself as much as they do about broadcasts of football, and rightsholders: with truly unusual expediency, they are now trying to make “Piracy Shield” perform better.
The Italian press says this is to “extend to VPNs the obligation to disable access to illegal games by blocking the use of VPNs to generate different IP addresses capable of circumventing the law.”
