hckrnws
Spanish court declines to fine NordVPN over LaLiga piracy blocking order
(torrentfreak.com)
127
87
by gslin
by gslin
PSA: if you still think its not the time to fight for your rights for the status quo in privacy you will come to regret it. If you are the type of person who reads this type of news and thinks: "cool the system is working, it'll sort itself out" you will come to regret it.
you will need to become more active or it will be taken away
The extreme majority of people has no fucking clue about how to act about anything, and it's definitely the biggest blocker.
[dead]
What do you think are your chances of winning this in the constitutional court?
Too fucking right. It is beyond tiresome to fire up the laptop and wonder whether I'll need a VPN to access GitHub today
1. See headline 'movie pirate goes to prison' which implies a link between the activity and the event 2. Actually read article based on industry press release and learn that the defendant was actually convicted for counterfeiting because they were running a business selling set-top boxes with preinstalled unauthorised streaming software or running their own third party unauthorised streaming service with paid subscriptions or something.
> Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters.
> There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.
> Complaining on the internet every time laliga shuts down github etc isn't going to change anything, we can't solve your problems, the change has to come from within.
Props to the court for telling laliga to go away.
Does it mean "agrees with what I interpret the constitution to mean" or "agrees with what the constitutional court interprets it to mean"? This law is unconstitutional in the first sense, constitutional in the second.
This is not unique to Spain – the US Supreme Court has a long history of interpreting the US constitution to mean a lot of things which aren't obviously in the original meaning of the text. Its recent conservative turn has seen it overturn some of those precedents, but many of them still stand.
Spain's constitutional court – much like the US Supreme Court – is a politicised body – if one doesn't agree with its jurisprudence, the answer is to vote for parties who will appoint judges with different jurisprudence.
If you're talking about that "gendered violence" gets different penalties compared to just "general violence", I think that's less about "different prison terms for men and women" but again, maybe you're talking about something else?
Check articles 153, 171, and 172 of the Spanish Penal Code.
For the people following along at home, parent is talking about "Ley Orgánica 1/2004, de 28 de diciembre, de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género" AKA LIVG, which is a law containing gender-violence provisions aimed at a specific form of inequality in intimate-partner violence, as we (Spain) has a lot of that.
You missed a few zeroes there buddy
> According to LaLiga itself, around 3,000 IP addresses are blocked every weekend[1]
[1] https://cybernews.com/news/cloudflare-spain-laliga-piracy-bl...
I've been trying to keep track myself and so far in my months of collecting, I've noted down one service which is unavailable during the matches for me, Docker Hub, everything else seems to work today.
Keep in mind, when they first started the blocks, a lot more was taken offline than what gets taken down when a match happens today, as they seem to continuously adjust it. The article you linked is from almost exactly a year ago, fwiw.
My own company would get taken down.
I think it's the same group of people who experience AWS downtime while having all their infrastructure there then go "Well, we're tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, guess we'll blame upstream".
However all my torrent traffic already goes through VPN and I don't watch football or any kind of live Spanish TV, I have zero interest in any sport.
I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if the blocking actually worked - my neighbour happily watches pirate futbol streams over the internal while my dev tools get blocked
Yeah, it does. They banned an unreasonably large range of Cloudflare CDN IPs pretty regularly during LaLiga matches, effectively blocking big chunks of the internet from Spain. It has gained fairly broad notice across the world in the last year[1]
However this is why infrastructure and connection method is needing to be removed from the government by creation and adoption of alternatives such as mesh.
The European economy is still largely the same as pre-WW2, heavy machineries, cars, chemicals and these are becoming less relevant with Chinese competition. However, the move to tech never materialized like in the US, so no surprise when soccer becomes more important than anything else, it's the only long term viable export in bleak places like Spain
Also european countries are deeply competitive in areas like industrial automation, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, telecommunications infrastructure, renewable energy systems, scientific instrumentation, petrochemicals etc.
Tourism is strong because the immense cultural heritage.
We do have more sustainable efforts. Not as big but better.
OT: La Liga shouldn’t have this kind of power and it’s good to see the court take a stance
And the point is that the object played in "American Football" is not a ball. Balls are round. It is egg shaped. The object played in "Football" is a ball. Describing the ball in football as an egg just makes you look like you can't see properly.
I don't think giving up one's national sport is really the right response here. We should absolutely be able to enjoy sports without bowing down to regulatory-capture-by-former-government-ministers
You're right, you absolutely should... but the only way to tell them that you don't like their policies is to stop giving them your money.
[deleted]
Which, to be clear, does explicitly discriminate depending if the aggressor is a man or a woman, since it defines gender violence as something that men do to women, explicitly.
You are not even disagreeing. You are arguing in favor of such discrimination and justifying it. This is not the place to argue such matters but the point that generally considering a law to be constitutional or not is no guarantee is more than proven.
The law does explicitly create sex-asymmetric criminal treatment in these partner-violence offenses, I wouldn't deny this. A man assaulting, threatening, or coercing a female partner can fall under the LIVG-linked "violencia de género" provisions while a woman doing the equivalent to a male partner generally does not.
But our Constitutional Court has ruled that this asymmetry is constitutionally valid, because it treats the offense as gender violence tied to structural inequality, not as punishment merely for being male. This is why I think this isn't considering discrimination, and why it isn't unconstitutional.
I think the disagreement comes from what actually is discrimination, rather than me being OK with discrimination and others not, or vice-versa. I'm trying to explain the legal situation as objectively as I can, based only on what the legal texts actually say, and I'm trying to help you understand the reasoning of the Constitutional Court here, as obviously they don't agree with this being discriminatory.
As you said, despite being flagrantly unconstitutional since men and women are supposed to be equal, the constitutional court said it’s okay to have different prison terms for men and women for the same exact offences.
It's sunny today, finally getting a bit warmer today and the chiringuito just opened, I'm gonna go have some croquetas de pollo and enjoy the day at the beach, I hope your day will be similarly pleasant!
> The Constitutional Court has also upheld it, meaning it's quite literally not unconstitutional.
a weak argument when stated that absolute. Constitutional Courts occasionally shift in their opinions over time. If they do change -- has the previous court violated the constitution? Or is the constitution flexible enough to hold opposite viewpoints without being violated? Doesn't it become very flimsy at that point?
I think a better wording would it is not currently considered to be unconstitutional. It might be in the future if the court changes. Naturally that only happens over longer periods of time as old judges die and are replaced with younger judges who were born in a different era and raised with different values.
Most companies who used to use Cloudflare and actually want to be available to users, moved away a long time ago, it's a lot easier than many think.
They've also blocked Fastly in the past. I doubt any large CDN is immune.
> if you know that doing so will make it unavailable for 2-3 hours per week?
You expect companies all across the world to abandon their CDN providers because two countries (Spain and Italy) are being dicks about futbol?
When was this exactly? Last time I heard about Fastly and La Liga in the same paragraph, was when Fastly and La Liga joined up to combat piracy together, I'm guessing what you speak of predates this? Not finding any information about this online though, either in English nor Spanish.
> You expect companies all across the world to abandon their CDN providers because two countries (Spain and Italy) are being dicks about futbol?
No, where are you getting that from?
Parent says their company gets blocked when the Cloudflare IPs get blocked, so that makes it sound like they're Cloudflare users. If they've experienced these blocks for two years already, yet still are complaining about it instead of fixing it, then I expect them to actually try something else than just complaining about it. But I'm also a pragmatist, and I know not everyone in this country is, so this might be why it feels so obvious to me.
> while my dev tools get blocked
What dev tools are you talking about here, that depends on remote Cloudflare IPs? Maybe I got used to the overall crap internet service here in Spain, but I couldn't imagine basing anything I need for my day-to-day job on something remote/on the internet that I couldn't use just because I wasn't online.
It's never just been Cloudflare. There's even a blogpost from Vercel[1] about it when they had their exit nodes banned during the biggest outage last year:
> This issue isn’t isolated to Vercel. Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, and BunnyCDN are also affected.
[1] https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...
You again reference blog posts from more than a year ago, the situation here in Spain isn't the same today as it was back then, it isn't blocking as much as it used to, and surely if you're personally impacted by these blocks, like I am, then you'd notice the difference today compared to before?
And no, "the whole internet" does not get blocked, a handful of Cloudflare IPs get blocked, so any neighbors using those IPs too, are also unavailable.
Maybe it's just me, but some IPs on Cloudflare being blocked isn't "blocked the whole internet" and if you it is, I suggest you start visiting more websites than the 1-2 American ones you're stuck in seemingly.
Which websites/services that you use was actually hit by this and what ISP are you on though?
> I've been trying to keep track myself and so far in my months of collecting, I've noted down one service which is unavailable during the matches for me, Docker Hub, everything else seems to work today.`
I get why you would feel like this since it sounds pretty obvious. However, especially if we are being pragmatic, we should consider that reality is a little bit more complicated:
- We don't know the terms of their contract: how much does it cost them to use CloudFlare services, if they have a chance of "cancelling" just the CDN (in the case of them having more stuff contracted), etc.
- If they decided to pay for CloudFlare services and not some other companies, they might have reasons for not wanting to migrate.
- It does not change that a 3rd party unilaterally decided to start this practice (let's remember that even CloudFlare has finally talked about this and they are obviously pissed) affecting other businesses because apparently theirs is more important.
Honestly this doesn't affect me, but that doesn't change that I get why they feel like even if they could (which we don't know) move away from CloudFlare, they don't think they should just because Tebas said so.
EDIT: Formatting
Yes, I agree that it sucks and is terrible that the football league has so much power of internet infrastructure, especially when we're supposed to have free access to internet, that's in our constitution, and Spain also agreed as such when entering EU too, and many other reasons. That's a larger legal battle, one I'm personally not involved in, but I could take the time to actually understand what happens practically and the full scope, so I can at least note down exactly what went down at what time, so I can keep sending complaints about it.
But to truly understand, gather evidence and having any sort of chance of actually affecting this, you need to understand the full scope of it, outside of the piracy streams, the stuff that is getting blocked that shouldn't. A year ago I noticed a lot of that happening, but today not so much, so clearly it's different today, but still important to gather the full picture before you jump to conclusions.
Even if it only affected DockerHub, that's sufficient to break many modern developer workflows.
It is however not only DockerHub - as I mentioned upthread, GitHub and AWS are both routinely affected. I've also had npm and crates.io blocked at various times.
You may be getting lucky with how closely your particular ISP is adhering to the block requests, but others are less lucky.