After the operations of the Guardia di Finanza against the “pezzotto” now comes the heavy judgment of the Court: CloudFlare must stop offering its services to illegal IPTV.
For years IPTV online TVs have illegally broadcast millions of movies and TV series protected by copyright and entire soccer leagues and seasons of other sports without having the TV rights. There are millions of users of these services all over the world, but now something is changing, as shown by the decision of the Court of Milan, Enterprise section, against CloudFlare.
CloudFlare is one of the largest CDN services in the world, that is Content Delivery Network (it calls itself the fastest CDN in the world). A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers optimized to transmit large amounts of data to large amounts of users and is the most widely used technology for streaming audio and video today. CloudFlare has servers in 200 cities, in more than 100 countries around the world and for this reason its services are often used by illegal IPTV to distribute pirated content. But, for this reason, it has also ended up under the magnifying glass of investigators and has been the subject of the recent decision of the Court of Milan.
Court of Milan: maxi fine to CloudFlare
The Court of Milan has ordered CloudFlare, which is an American company with headquarters in San Francisco, to cease all relations and cut off all services to illegal IPTVs. The Tribunal did even more: it established a fine of 5.000 euros per day for each day of non-compliance with the obligation.
The Google issue
Another extremely interesting thing is the fact that the Enterprise section of the Tribunal of Milan also decided to oblige Google Ireland Ltd, i.e. the parent company of Google in Europe, to “deposit the information necessary to identify the recipients of its services”.
La lotta alle IPTV
Negli ultimi anni, e in particolare negli ultimi mesi, la lotta contro le IPTV illegali si è fatta durissima: a novembre la Guardia di Finanza di Napoli ha scoperto e chiuso 700 siti di streaming illegale, mentre a settembre con l’operazione Evil Web la Guardia di Finanza di Gorizia aveva chiuso altri 58 siti e 18 canali Telegram dedicato proprio alla trasmissione di contenuti senza diritti. Sempre la GdF, a dicembre, con l’operazione “The Net“ ha sequestrato un grosso network di IPTV illegali con almeno 50.000 utenti.
In tutti questi casi gli utenti di questi servizi illegali hanno visto comparire sullo schermo, al posto dei contenuti (film, serie TV e partite) una cartello che preannuncia il prossimo passo di questa battaglia: “La sottoscrizione o l’utilizzo di servizi di streaming illegale comporta la pena da sei mesi a tre anni e la multa da euro 2.582 a euro 25.822. The access data are evidentiary material available to the Judicial Authority”.
The next ones to be affected, therefore, will be the users of these illegal services that, only in Italy, are at least 5 million.