Isaac
Years ago
Live sports streaming sites shut down by US gov
This is going to impact anyone who relies on less-than-legal live sports streams that are hosted on .com, .net and .org. If your favourite sites are still up now, there's no guarantee they will be for long.
Federal authorities said Thursday they had seized and shuttered 307 domains, 16 allegedly engaged in unauthorized live sports streaming and the remainder accused of selling fake professional sports merchandise, including National Football League paraphernalia.Full article at Wired
NBL feeds are unlikely to be targeted as the sport just isn't big enough and the league has no clout or relevance with ICE, but fans relying on those streams could be collateral damage if they're hosted by those big sites and are targeted.
Streaming sites in different domain name spaces (.ly, etc) will be harder for American authorities to tackle and will survive a while longer. I don't believe there is any risk at this point (outside of malware/etc) for the end fans using the streaming sites. Unlike drug use and maybe general copyright infringement, they are going to the source at this point.
In the end, any sites shut will just pop up again elsewhere. While the demand is there, the authorities will be playing whack-a-mole for a while yet.
Just wanted to bring it to the attention of those interested.
What's your stance on unauthorised live feeds? Is rebroadcasting defensible (in poorly reached markets, for example) or are the restrictions justified and never to be broken?
Personally, I suspect the marketplace will eventually overrun laws of copyright infringement in some spaces but the big companies with a lot at stake won't cave easily. There was an article recently with quotes from recording artist Neil Young saying that he thought online piracy of music was the new radio - free discovery of music for fans. (Not identical, just similar in some ways.) Can see his point.
I'd like to see countries consider making geo-restrictions like DVD region encoding or prevention of parallel importing illegal. If you want to profit from pricing inequality (third world labour), let consumers do the same.
