England’s Premier League has obtained a DMCA subpoena against Cloudflare, hoping to curb the seemingly unbridled growth of sports streaming services. The filing in the Central District of California identifies dozens of infringing domains and demands that Cloudflare produce identifying data, including account history and physical addresses.
As England’s top football competition, the Premier League draws hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the world.
Aside from the sportive stakes, the Premier League also has a vested interest in selling broadcast rights. These rights generate billions of pounds in revenue per year; a staggering amount unmatched by any other football league.
Yet, other leagues are not the main threat to these broadcast revenues. Instead, piracy has emerged as the Premier League’s main nemesis, with many football fans turn to cheaper pirate streaming services to watch ‘the people’s game’.
In recent years, the Premier League has tried several legal avenues to tackle the piracy problem. In addition to obtaining blocking orders in multiple countries, the organization has been a driving force behind several lawsuits, some of which resulted in prison sentences.
Cloudflare & Pirate Sites
While the football league typically finds the law on its side, identifying its ‘opponents’ isn’t always easy. Operators of streaming sites and services are typically aware of the legal risks and do their best to remain anonymous. Presumably as part of this strategy, they use services made available by Cloudflare.
Cloudflare doesn’t make the operators of piracy sites ‘anonymous’ but it does shield their hosting locations from public view. Rightsholders can overcome this barrier through formal complaints, after which Cloudflare identifies the hosting services. To obtain additional information, however, rightsholders have to go to court.
Earlier this month the Premier League took this follow-up step by asking a California federal court to issue a DMCA subpoena. The request, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, identifies dozens of target pirate streaming sites and “Access Points”. Through the court, the Premier League hopes to identify the persons connected to these domains.
Premier League Requests Action
Before going to court, the Premier League’s American law firm, Hagan Noll & Boyle, sent a formal notification to Cloudflare.
“Cloudflare is asked to remove or disable access to Premier League’s copyrighted works, which, based on the infringement that has occurred to date through the websites and domain names identified above, will continue to be infringed in this same manner throughout the Premier League season,” attorney Timothy M. Frank wrote.
The letter identifies specific streaming site domains and includes screenshots of the websites where these are shown.
In addition to public-facing sites, the Premier League pointed to various “backend links” where the pirated football streams are actually being sourced. The legal paperwork shows unauthorized broadcasts of various matches including Brentford v. Leeds United, Crystal Palace v. Manchester City, and Nottingham Forest v. Tottenham Hotspur.
Several of the targeted sites utilize sophisticated redirection chains to reach their audience. For example, dooball345.com was found to redirect through dooball345s.com before landing on dooball345x.com. Similarly, pelotalibrevivo.net redirects users to pirlotvenvivo.club.
The court records also highlight how these sites often use unique CDN links and m3u8 playlists, sometimes involving tokens and session IDs—to serve live content to millions of global viewers.
Cloudflare Must Identify Operators?
The Premier League’s letter to Cloudflare didn’t result in the immediate termination of the accounts, but it is used to request the DMCA subpoena at the the California federal court.
The proposed subpoena, which has yet to be signed off on, would require Cloudflare to hand over information sufficient to identify the alleged infringers, including any names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, payment information, account updates, and account histories.
Whether the Premier League will find any of the information usable is another matter. Many pirate site owners use inaccurate data, but the explicit request for payment information and account history aims to provide a clearer financial trail than standard subscriber data.
—
A copy of the requested DMCA subpoena is available here (pdf) and the Premier League’s declaration can be found here (pdf). Below is a list of the targeted “Access Point” domain names identified in the legal filing:
– 247sport.org
– 4k-yalla-shoot.info (redirects to yallashootspro.com and 3arabsports.net)
– antenasport.org
– bingsport.site
– deporte-libre.click
– dooball345.com (redirects to dooball345s.com and dooball345x.com)
– goaldaddyth.com
– hesgoal.watch
– librefutboltv.su
– livesports088.com (redirects to keelalive52.com)
– ovogoaal.com
– pelotalibrevivo.net (redirects to pirlotvenvivo.club)
– rbtvplus17.help (redirects to fctv33.work and nplb6earneyhtycourage.sbs)
– ronaldo7.me (redirects to streameasthd.com)
– t4tv.click
– vachvoi.link
– wearechecking.online (redirects to wac.rip)
– yallalshoot.com
– yalla4shoot.com
– yallla-shoot.com (redirects to yallashoot-4k.com, yallashootlivehd.com, wuyh.online )
– sportshd.app
Source: 
TorrentFreak.com
Be the first to comment