01 Out 2024 · Internet
Many prefer to use pirated IPTV services instead of paying streaming services or sports channels. This practice is illegal and can cause legal problems, which so far fall on those who sell and provide these services. This may change soon, with the advent of automatic fines for end users. Europe seems to be responding.
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New measures against pirated IPTV
IPTV may not go away to watch football for free, but it won’t be for lack of trying. So far, Italy is the European country with the strictest legislation, thanks to a law introduced a year ago and proposed by football rights holders in Spain. This, despite the fact that its effectiveness is seriously doubted.
The new Italian law has two parts. On the one hand, Piracy Shield, fast blocking of pirated IPTV pages and services that operators must implement within a maximum period of 30 minutes from the request made by the rights holders. A quick, but easily avoidable blockade that results in a large number of collateral victims.
The part of the new law that has attracted the most attention is the fines for the end users of these services: anyone who buys an IPTV decoder or contracts a service through Telegram and others. The law intends to impose fines of up to 5,000 euros on users, to discourage use and ensure that these services die due to lack of users.
Automatic fines for end users
However, it has been more than a year since the law was passed quickly to coincide with the start of the Italian Serie A, and the fines have not appeared. Now, Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo announced in a YouTube broadcast a “memorandum of agreement” between the police, the justice system and the regulator, which establishes the basis for issuing fines to users.
The agreement was reportedly made between AGCOM, the Italian financial police (Guardia di Finanza) and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Rome. It wants to make it easier to identify users of rogue IPTV services. The entire process would be automatic. If a user accesses a pirated service, they will be automatically registered and a fine will be applied, the value of which will depend on whether they are repeat offenders and how many times they have been caught.
The biggest obstacle to fines for rogue IPTV users is their identification. Although this may be complicated in many European countries, in Italy, they claim to have found a way to do it, but there is still a lot to clarify.