MADRID, 18 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
LaLiga president Javier Tebas reiterated on Wednesday that “the biggest challenge in the world of football and the sports industry in general” is the problem of piracy and made it clear that ‘Google’ “is the main cause and is not taking adequate measures” to tackle this scourge.
“The big problem we are currently facing, in my opinion, is that we, the victims and those of us affected, are not very clear about how to deal with the problem without knowing the situation and the actors involved very well,” said the leader in his appearance at the World Football Summit in Seville, where he stressed that in audiovisual fraud “illegal consumption of piracy had never reached such high levels.”
The president insisted that “lately the problem is not only that ‘pirate’ who uploads the game so that, through an IP, the ‘pirate’ consumer can connect, but there is also a very important problem in the entire process for a consumer to be able to consume a ‘pirated’ product” and in which “very important companies” such as ‘Amazon’ or ‘Cloudflare’ or “messaging companies such as ‘Telegram’, ‘WhatsApp’, ‘Discord’ or ‘Signal’, where the ‘pirates’ make themselves known, are involved.”
In this regard, he acknowledged “a serious problem with ‘X'” because Elon Musk “has fired a lot of people and there is practically no one left in piracy.” “And currently on ‘X’ content of all kinds is retransmitted, from all sports, which is absolutely illegal,” he said.
However, Tebas focused on the role of ‘Google’, owner of ‘Android’ and where people “download applications that provide illegal content.” “It is true that ‘Google’ removes them when we report that they are ‘pirated’, but consumers have already downloaded them to their ‘smartphones’ and can continue using them. And there are millions of consumers,” he said.
“Google is the main cause of the current piracy problem and is not taking the appropriate measures and is being complicit in the activity of piracy in the theft of property,” said the president of LaLiga, for whom piracy “is generating some 600-700 million euros less in income for Spanish football.”
The president did not hide the fact that this “is a very complicated moment.” “And if the political authorities that legislate do not take this seriously, we could face a very important crisis in elite sports content, in this case football, in the next three years,” he concluded.