MarkMonitor Symposium: Online pirates need to change tactics

[Len]

Online pirates showing live football will need to change their tactics in the face of increased enforcement efforts, according to panellists at the MarkMonitor Spring Symposium in London.

Speaking in a session on online piracy, one panellist said: “Pirates need to be pragmatic, the situations will keep arising and changing, but we can find the trends and take them down.”

The panellist, who works for a well-known football league, added: "We took down 370 streams of this season’s Carabao cup final between Manchester City and Arsenal, and those are just the ones that were found.”

For smaller leagues, one of the panellists said that it can be difficult to take some of these streams down due to smaller teams and a lack of time.

Another panellist added that the odds may be stacked against small teams, but there are still plenty of resources available to fight against piracy.

According to one panellist, social media is having a massive impact on piracy rates in football.

He said: “We can take down stuff on YouTube, only for private Facebook groups to then take that content and post it on there.”

When asked whether other football leagues might consider following the Belgian Pro League and La Liga in joining forces with other rights holders to help build intellectual property strategies, one panellist, who works for a smaller league, said: “We are working very closely together with all of the big European leagues and are working together on a bilateral level.”