Google and Cloudflare Summoned To Explain Their Plans To Defeat Pirate IPTV

Italy's telecoms regulator AGCOM has summoned Google and Cloudflare to a September meeting to discuss strategies for combating online piracy, six months after launching its Piracy Shield blocking system. The move comes as IPTV piracy remains resilient despite new anti-piracy legislation passed in the country last year. The law introduced harsher penalties for providers and consumers of pirated content, including fines for watching pirate streams. It also granted more aggressive site-blocking powers.

Major stream suppliers appear minimally affected by overseas laws. however. AGCOM chief Massimiliano Capitanio seeks commitments from Google to limit pirate services in search results, according to TorrentFreak. The regulator also wants Cloudflare to address IPTV providers using its services to evade blocking.

Both Sides

[darkain]

On one side, you've got physical media being discontinued everywhere and streaming services getting shittier and shittier every year while costing more.

On the other side, you're got companies arguing that it is perfectly okay to do mass-piracy so long as it is feeding "AI" models.

And yet these counties want to pass laws that hurt the consumers trying to vote with their dollars rather than going after the companies making the world shittier.

Re: Both Sides

[phantomfive]

I decided to try YouTube to buy a show this week. I watched two episodes, and then it started giving me an error and won't let me watch the next episode. I won't be buying media from Google anymore, I'd rather pirate it, because Google literally just stole money from me.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, no, we gave you a potential license to maybe access vapor

that's how it works, capital trickles up by design, it's only stealing if you do it

Re:

[Nephilimi]

IANAL but if that happened to me I'd happily pirate it. I bought an access license, technical problems on platform prevent me from primary viewing method, I'm using the unofficial alternate viewing method.

Re:Both Sides

[nightflameauto]

And yet these counties want to pass laws that hurt the consumers trying to vote with their dollars rather than going after the companies making the world shittier.

Did you miss the memo? Corporations are the best people. And governments exist to serve, protect, and take care of them. Citizens are a nuisance. They don't even send billions of dollars in campaign donations and legalized bribes directly to government officials. How can they be expected to take people seriously that don't hand them money? For fuck sake. Get with the program. This is the 21st century. Humans are passe. Corporations are *IN*.

Don't be Evil

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

Uh oh, they're being Evil.
I definitely feel a 1984 plus Minority Report with a dash of Fifth Element vibe lately.
Seems like Big Tech isn't your friend after all.

Re:

[gweihir]

Seems like Big Tech isn't your friend after all.

Obviously, it never was.

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

Seems like Big Tech isn't your friend after all.

Obviously, it never was.

Yep! Sounds like we'd better oppose their political agendas!

(glances at 80% of google doodles, looks at the history of google censorship)

Umm ...

Re:

[chuckugly]

That's 3 violations, now you have enough paper to wipe your ass.

Re:

[codebase7]

You needed three? :P

Re:

[phantomfive]

The reason they took "don't be evil" out is so they could be evil. What other reason could there be?

Gotta love it!

[lsllll]

You grow big to the point most people are using your services and now you're on the hook for things out of your control. This is government done right!

Re: Gotta love it!

[NotEmmanuelGoldstein]

Making government responsible for corporate profits is fascism. Letting government dump 'its' problems on whipping boys is a slippery slope.

Next, government will fix the baby shortage: No contraception, no abortion, no jobs, no pre-marital sex (Government doesn't want to pay for babies, which is the biggest problem.) : Slavery with a different name.

Law of the Internet...

[sillivalley]

As set down by John Perry Barlow: The internet treats censorship like damage, and routes around it. Yet another attempt to disprove this...

Go ahead, squeeze your fists tighter

[Rick Schumann]

The tighter you squeeze, the more will slip right through your fingers. Pirates gonna pirate, you've never been able to stop it before, you can't stop it now, you'll never stop it in the future, either -- and if you become so draconian about it that you can almost stop it completely, you'll alienate so many people that you'll lose even more money on top of the money you're wasting trying to stop a few people from filesharing.

You couldn't stop people from recording vinyl LPs onto cassette tapes.
You couldn'

Re:Go ahead, squeeze your fists tighter

[lsllll]

Pirates gonna pirate, you've never been able to stop it before, you can't stop it now, you'll never stop it in the future, either

There's no way to stop it, but there sure as hell is a way to put a dent in it, which is to give people what they want. People don't want to not be able to watch The Office because they're in a certain country. When people purchase a show, they want to have it for a lifetime, as if they had bought the DVD. That, and don't be so greedy to the point that it starts to hurt your business by people resorting to pirating. Prices should be reasonable. $16.95 CDs were outrageous back in the 90s. Don't try to gauge people just because the medium changed from cassette to CD, or from VHS to DVD and BluRay, and then online. The execs will never adhere to these basic fundamentals, because they're trying to make more money, and guest what? That'll lead to more piracy.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Or don't steal from your customers after they buy the show, before they even get a chance to watch it.

Re:

[mjwx]

Pirates gonna pirate, you've never been able to stop it before, you can't stop it now, you'll never stop it in the future, either

There's no way to stop it, but there sure as hell is a way to put a dent in it, which is to give people what they want. People don't want to not be able to watch The Office because they're in a certain country. When people purchase a show, they want to have it for a lifetime, as if they had bought the DVD. That, and don't be so greedy to the point that it starts to hurt your business by people resorting to pirating. Prices should be reasonable. $16.95 CDs were outrageous back in the 90s. Don't try to gauge people just because the medium changed from cassette to CD, or from VHS to DVD and BluRay, and then online. The execs will never adhere to these basic fundamentals, because they're trying to make more money, and guest what? That'll lead to more piracy.

Pirates are, by and large, unserved customers.

The problem with the media cartels is that they'd rather have unserved customers than dare lower their prices or *gasp* let people have the content they want without locking it down.

Re:

[lsllll]

You have absolutely hit the nail on the head. They've realized that the revenues they're losing to pirates is much lower than what they would lose if they lower prices and relinquished control, so they'll continue to make larger profits and continue to cry that they're losing to pirates and subtract those amount from their taxes. It's a win-win for them!

So if you want to be your own IPTV provider

[Casandro]

There's software like https://github.com/Casandro/tv... [github.com] to play around. You connect it to tvheadend and it'll create a simple web page with a list of channels. If you click on one of the channels, ffmpeg will start in the background to reencode the channel. It's still more or less a proof of concept, but it works nicely. It's designed to be simple to set up, so there is no authentication.

Of course you can run it as a Tor Onion Service.