Spanish court declines to fine NordVPN over LaLiga piracy blocking order

79 points by gslin 12 hours ago on hackernews | 72 comments

swiftcoder | 11 hours ago

> “Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore,” NordVPN writes

Too fucking right. It is beyond tiresome to fire up the laptop and wonder whether I'll need a VPN to access GitHub today

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

When the blocks happen, does it take GitHub with it for you? I'm on Vodafone (in Spain) and it's just a few Cloudflare IPs that get blocked during the matches, never had GitHub unavailable, as Microsoft doesn't use Cloudflare for GitHub, AFAIK.

swiftcoder | 9 hours ago

Cloudflare seems to be the most common victim, but I've seen Fastly get banned out as well (which seems to be what GitHub uses as their CDN in the EU)

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

AFAIK, it's literally exclusively Cloudflare for me, never seen anything else (IP) banned, just the good old DNS-based blocking for some other crap, but maybe it's because of my ISP. What ISP are you on? They all seem to be responding and doing this differently.

swiftcoder | 6 hours ago

Movistar, masmovil, and orange. From what I can tell they all tend to implement slightly different overlapping blocks.

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

embedding-shape | 6 hours ago

Huh, where is the court order about the Fastly stuff? Also funny that the only major one you seem to be missing is Vodafone, which is the ISP I have, and Fastly never been blocked here, although Vodafone is more than eager to add things to their block-list.

> 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.

swiftcoder | 6 hours ago

> What dev tools are you talking about here, that depends on remote Cloudflare IPs?

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...

embedding-shape | 5 hours ago

Again, what dev tool are you using that get blocked because of these blocks? Is it Vercel you're unable to use during the blocks? Because my local Vercal installations keeps working just as well with no internet as with internet, so I'm guessing some Cloudflare IPs going offline won't have any effect either.

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?

iamnothere | 2 hours ago

“But how does it affect you PERSONALLY?”

embedding-shape | 2 hours ago

As someone who actually IS affected by this personally, I'd love to have any details from others affected too, not sure why this would be surprising.

iamnothere | 2 hours ago

You seem to be in this thread downplaying the seriousness of the problem using the common trope I quoted above. The thing is, even if someone isn’t personally affected, it’s still a bad situation that a football league has this kind of power over internet infrastructure, and it’s ok for them to oppose that situation!

embedding-shape | an hour ago

I'm trying to understand the full scope of it, because I keep reading about how many websites don't work, and developer tooling that doesn't work, but then I sit here with a Spanish ISP and can only notice one going offline during games (Docker Hub), everything else I use on a daily basis keeps working. So I'm not downplaying, I'm trying to understand if the difference is truly so large between different ISPs, or if people just rely on completely different tooling, and if so, what are they using exactly?

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.

isodev | 8 hours ago

I hope there is a secondary effect to all this - that websites, operators and web apps look for alternatives instead of always using Cloudflare (who themselves are a kind of LaLiga just in a different vertical).

embedding-shape | 7 hours ago

The blocks been going on for around/almost two years now, the ones who cared about remaining online for their users during the La Liga matches they do the blocks (not all of them anymore it seems) already moved, the only ones left on Cloudflare seems to be some people that refuse to move away regardless of how their users are impacted by it.

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".

anonzzzies | 25 minutes ago

I do not say it is not true because too many cases pop up here, however, I live in Spain and so does my company and we had this 0 times. Provider dependent? We have domestic fiber in Malaga.

nubinetwork | 11 hours ago

I'll repeat what I said the last time about laliga...

> 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.

JrProgrammer | 10 hours ago

Refering to football as foot egg when it’s actually a ball as opposed to the hand egg in the US is weird to me.

OT: La Liga shouldn’t have this kind of power and it’s good to see the court take a stance

nubinetwork | 10 hours ago

They call American football handegg, we should be able to do the opposite. :P
that just sounds petty for the sake of pettiness, surely you can do better in terms of mocking

ktallett | 10 hours ago

The opposite would be foot ball. Although both are petty as anyway both are called it because it is played on foot with a ball. Not because you use your foot to kick a ball.

louthy | 10 hours ago

Which is foot ball. Not foot egg.

AndrewDucker | 9 hours ago

The opposite of "hand egg" is not "foot egg".

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.

cobbzilla | 7 hours ago

i get it, it’s not the canonical “egg shape”, but many eggs (fish/frogs/etc) are spherical.

AndrewDucker | 6 hours ago

"Foot Fish-egg" would be pretty funny, I agree.

swiftcoder | 9 hours ago

> There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games

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

nubinetwork | 9 hours ago

> 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.

breppp | 10 hours ago

[flagged]

ktallett | 10 hours ago

You mean other than Berlin, Malmö, Paris, London, Munich, and many others. Europe doesn't have so many huge companies but that's not a bad thing. We do have a lot of companies doing key work that may benefit society as a whole.

breppp | 6 hours ago

While there are outliers, most of the European economy is Spain rather than Sweden

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

bromuro | 5 hours ago

In Spain soccer is culturally important - not economically central. Everyone in the world knows teams like Real Madrid or Barcelona. On the other side Spain is home of major telecom and banking multinationals, high-speed rail networks, renewable energy... the startup ecosystem is strong in many cities.

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.

ktallett | 10 hours ago

Considering web addresses are easily changed, it was a futile suggestion to say block LaLiga streams. Good on Nordvpn. As a football fan, the owners of the leagues have too much power. Like in the UK people have gone to jail for piracy, which should never happen.

chadgpt3 | 9 hours ago

That is why they blocked the whole internet. You can't avoid a block by changing your address if the whole internet is blocked.

ktallett | 9 hours ago

They didn't mean to, just they were incompetent. Also considering Spanish league is spread over the full long weekend a waste of time.

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.

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

Who blocked the whole internet? Doesn't happen here in Spain, which is the context for this submission, is "blocked the whole internet" what they do in the UK?

swiftcoder | 9 hours ago

> Doesn't happen here in Spain

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]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-geGEYEw7g

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

Haha, what? Are you going in circles? We're talking about the La Liga matches, that's the context of this conversation :P

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.

ktallett | 9 hours ago

The whole internet wasn't blocked but a significant percentage was taken down due to the attempt to take down la liga streams. As explained, some banks, some payments systems, and a few other things stopped working due to the governments attempt at blocking streams. The government are clearly trying to exercise control over the people in a way that just doesn't work. It's no surprise though as the government has always been too heavily involved in football in Spain, especially Real Madrid and Barcelona.

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

> but a significant percentage

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.`

squiffsquiff | 9 hours ago

I am not defending the current situation but I am not aware of any case where anyone in the UK has gone to jail for piracy. Invariably what actually happens in such cases is:

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.

anthk | 10 hours ago

Sue the courts for telecomms interruption and tampering from LaLiga.

chadgpt3 | 9 hours ago

You can't sue a court in a court for doing court stuff. Courts are superuser. They can do anything they want to. The recourse is vetting people before they become judges.

picsao | 9 hours ago

This seems dysfunctional and a API for institutional subversion. If you can subvert the machinery that creates judges, you can basically take over a democracy without having any way to fix that except for institutional repair and waiting out the working lifespan of judges (which can be 1.5 generations)

chadgpt3 | 9 hours ago

That is correct. It's why the Republican party went so hard to prevent any non-Republican judges from joining the supreme court over the last 1.5 generations.

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

Really confusing to talk about "Republicans" in a thread about Spain and not making it clear if you're talking about Republicans-Republicans or the modern Faux-Republican, AKA US-Republican :)

radiator | 9 hours ago

What do you mean "if you can"? It has already happened in several democratic countries.

mdlxxv | 9 hours ago

Finally, some common sense in this utterly absurd situation. I'm so glad this year's "fútbol" season ends this weekend. AFAIK, they don't break the Internet for Segunda División matches (yet!).

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

Oh boy do I have news for you; they're thinking of doing the same for other sports now too, not just football :) At least the blocks only been for a small amount of Cloudflare IPs, but still sucks big time.

mdlxxv | 9 hours ago

Sigh. As if I had not enough reasons to hate professional sports ...

thomastraum | 9 hours ago

fantastic work.

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

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

Literally it'll sort itself out, as the bans are unconstitutional and more, law just takes long time and we have other shit to sort out before starting to panic about 3-5 Cloudflare IPs getting banned for 2 hours a week...

swiftcoder | 9 hours ago

> about 3-5 Cloudflare IPs getting banned

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...

embedding-shape | 9 hours ago

Which IPs that you use daily are actually affected by this 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.

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.

> Which IPs that you use daily are actually affected by this though?

My own company would get taken down.

embedding-shape | 8 hours ago

Maybe don't use Cloudflare in front of your business if you know that doing so will make it unavailable for 2-3 hours per week? These blocks been happening for years, if you're still letting you be affected, maybe you want to provide a poor service to your users?

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.

swiftcoder | 6 hours ago

> Maybe don't use Cloudflare

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?

embedding-shape | 6 hours ago

> They've also blocked Fastly in the past. I doubt any large CDN is immune.

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.

eskori | 2 hours ago

>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.

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 thanks that is what I did, you'll see I used the past tense

embedding-shape | 5 hours ago

Right, but that's slightly misleading when we're talking about how people are affected (or not) by the current blocks today, not a year ago...

nekzn | 8 hours ago

In Spain we have a domestic abuse law that is unconstitutional (different prison terms for men and women) and it has been there for a very long time.

What do you think are your chances of winning this in the constitutional court?

embedding-shape | 8 hours ago

Are you talking about "Juzgados de Violencia Sobre la Mujer" or "Organic Act of Protection Measures against Gender Violence" or what are you lamenting? What law exactly and how is it unconstitutional?

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?

nekzn | 8 hours ago

I’m talking about the LIVG which sets different prison terms for men and women for the same crimes.

Check articles 153, 171, and 172 of the Spanish Penal Code.

embedding-shape | 8 hours ago

It is not a general "men and women get different prison terms for all the same crimes" rule, it applies to specific offences and specific relationship/victim categories. The Constitutional Court has also upheld it, meaning it's quite literally not unconstitutional.

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.

nekzn | 7 hours ago

It actually is that. Once again I ask you that you read the articles which quite clearly say what I said.

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.

embedding-shape | 7 hours ago

Having gone through the same tiring conversation with 80% of all the maschistas around me in real-life, then also hearing about it on TV every single day when a new woman gets murded by her ex/husband/boyfriend, I rather not bring in the same off-topic conversation into HN.

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!

nekzn | 7 hours ago

I was expecting a better argument than calling me a misogynist and bragging about living next to the beach, but hey what do I know.

embedding-shape | 6 hours ago

And I was expecting comments about internet censorship, you don't always get what you want :) I don't think you're a misogynist, just to be clear, different interpretation of laws shouldn't lead us to label people who argue about their point of view.

Levitz | 6 hours ago

>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.

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.

embedding-shape | 6 hours ago

I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing, nor providing justification, I'm just giving more context for people who might be reading about this and not having the full context or background of the wider conversation.

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.

luckylion | 16 minutes ago

I have no idea about that law in particular and no dog in that fight, but I find

> 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.

iLoveOncall | 8 hours ago

I wish people who state "you have to fight" also said how.

The extreme majority of people has no fucking clue about how to act about anything, and it's definitely the biggest blocker.

lifestyleguru | 9 hours ago

Fuck European football and everything about it. Hopefully this year's world cup will be absolute unpopular failure.