{"id":73965,"date":"2023-08-01T09:11:01","date_gmt":"2023-08-01T09:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=73965"},"modified":"2023-08-01T09:11:01","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T09:11:01","slug":"sky-obtains-novel-injunction-to-prevent-piracy-of-live-sports-house-of-the-dragon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=73965","title":{"rendered":"Sky Obtains Novel Injunction to Prevent Piracy of Live Sports & \u2018House of the Dragon\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pirate<\/a>For more than a decade, Sky has found its ISP division named as a respondent in injunction applications filed at the High Court in London. <\/p>\n

With the aim of reducing availability of pirated content, U.S. movie studios, recording labels, publishers, and more recently gaming company Nintendo, have named Sky and rival ISPs including Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk, Plusnet and EE, as facilitators of their customers\u2019 piracy habits. <\/p>\n

The adversarial nature of such applications has long given way to a process that establishes ongoing infringement, formalizes the ISPs\u2019 knowledge of that infringement, and then considers them \u2018innocent infringers\u2019 required to prevent infringement using various blocking measures. <\/p>\n

Those who obtain the blockades insist they\u2019re effective, hence the dozens of requests and thousands of online locations blocked over the last 13+ years.<\/p>\n

Sky as Both Applicant and Respondent<\/h2>\n

As a content producer and owner in its own right, Sky is an enthusiastic supporter of ISP blocking. When the MPA obtained a High Court injunction to block cyberlocker platform Mixdrop in early 2022, Sky joined the MPA<\/a> as an injunction applicant, with Sky\u2019s ISP division one of several ISP respondents, some of them content distributors in their own right.<\/p>\n

In an article published Sunday, the Financial Times<\/a> reported that Sky obtained another High Court blocking injunction last week, to protect its own broadcasts. The injunction reportedly has two aims, the first being to compel ISPs (including the one it operates) to block piracy services streaming its \u201cbest selling football games\u201d to the UK public at a cut-down price.<\/p>\n

The specifics of blocking programs are a tightly guarded secret; the Premier League and most major ISPs previously convinced the High Court that any disclosure could help to facilitate infringement of the Premier League\u2019s rights, and\/or help pirates circumvent High Court orders. With that established, it\u2019s no surprise that the report doesn\u2019t elaborate on what Sky will be able to block after winning the injunction last week. <\/p>\n

That being said, the mention of \u201cbest selling\u201d football games logically leads to Premier League matches, which are usually subject to blocking injunctions obtained directly by the Premier League itself and renewed each season at the High Court. That raises the interesting prospect of a potential changing of the guard.<\/p>\n

Injunction Has a Novel Feature<\/h2>\n

Whether Sky is preparing to take responsibility for protecting Premier League matches in the form of its own broadcasts is currently unknown, but another aspect of the injunction is perhaps even more interesting. Again, no specifics have been made public and that\u2019s unlikely to change, but it\u2019s being claimed that the injunction will also seek to protect some of Sky\u2019s linear TV channels.<\/p>\n

After a \u201cthird-party group\u201d identifies the sources of the illegal streams, Sky will be able to \u201cshut down individual pirate sites at certain times\u201d by issuing blocking instructions to the other ISPs named as respondents in the injunction. The Ashes on Sky Sports Cricket and House of the Dragon when airing on Sky Atlantic, are cited as two possible examples.<\/p>\n

So What\u2019s the Big Blocking Plan?<\/h2>\n

While even the most closely guarded secrets tend to leak out eventually, right now the specifics of the injunction are shrouded in mystery beyond the details above. However, by using information available to us right now, it\u2019s possible to formulate a small number of potential theories, with one standing out as the most logical.<\/p>\n

As previously reported<\/a>, Sky (the ISP division) previously provided the Premier League with considerable inside information relating to the servers its customers consumed most bandwidth from at specified times, knowing that there was a good chance these were servers offering \u2018pirate\u2019 streams.<\/p>\n

For obvious reasons, this raised eyebrows in respect of privacy, but documents discussing the program, seen by TF, indicate the mechanism is viewed in a particular way. Sky shouldn\u2019t be considered as monitoring customers\u2019 IP addresses, what they consume or from where. The focus should be placed at the other end instead; the IP addresses operated by pirate services and the volume of content they send to Sky\u2019s internet customers.<\/p>\n

Bringing More Blocking In-House Could Make Sense<\/h2>\n

With that subtle but legally significant difference in mind it\u2019s not difficult to see how that situation might improve, should Sky itself become the holder of an injunction to protect its own content. Using technical information from its own ISP, to protect its own content, not just that of a third party like the Premier League, could be considered entirely normal. <\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the case here, or if Sky still shares this type of information externally. But if it did, it would make sense to bring everything in-house and make better use of the monitoring already carried out to facilitate Premier League match blocking. That intelligence could then be used to protect scheduled TV content that Sky also owns, at the same time, at minimal cost.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that blocking Premier League content requires perpetual monitoring of many pirate IPTV services, even when matches aren\u2019t being played. Widening the range of content to be blocked using information already being collected in that process would be a more effective use of resources.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, IPTV blocking doesn\u2019t mean blocking just a channel or two, it means blocking entire pirate services, so it\u2019s not hard to see how blocking on match days a few days apart could be interspersed with blocking TV shows. Timed nicely, that could effectively mean the blocking of all known pirate services, perpetually. If presented as such in an application, that could lead to the court having reservations; as a welcome side-effect, it doesn\u2019t get much better than that.<\/p>\n

Whatever the plan, a scenario like that must be the end game, not just for Sky, but for all companies involved in TV content production and distribution. Aiming for anything less would mean pirate streams remaining viable and the overarching plan leaves no room for that.<\/p>\n

From: TF<\/a>, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.<\/p>\n

Powered by WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than a decade, Sky has found its ISP division named as a respondent in injunction applications filed at the High Court in London. With the aim of reducing availability of pirated content, U.S. movie studios, recording labels, publishers, and more recently gaming company Nintendo, have named Sky and rival ISPs including Virgin Media, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73966,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-torrent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/73966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}