LaLiga incorporates YouTube's Content ID tool into anti-piracy campaign

LaLiga's commitment to the battle against piracy and utilising cutting-edge technology to put paid to this scourge are two of the fundamental pillars in place in order to protect one of the organisation's most important assets: its competitions' audiovisual rights.

 

One of the tools that LaLiga has implemented is Content ID, a digital fingerprinting system that YouTube offers to copyright owners to make it easier to identify and report any illegal content that may appear on the video-sharing website. The material is automatically analysed and compared with an archived database provided by the content owners. Thanks to Content ID, LaLiga is able to submit claims on over 600,000 videos containing LaLiga material every year, with a level of precision that can even detect footage that has been modified by users.

 

This technology also creates fingerprints that make it possible to manually and automatically make claims on LaLiga content provided by users, as well as to stream LaLiga matches while blocking live broadcasts by other accounts.

 

This use of technology and the development of new methods in the fight against piracy are proving fruitful. The numbers are encouraging and reflect the hard work that LaLiga has been putting in: over 142,000 videos on social networks, over 2,400 social-media profiles, some 9,000 DNS cardsharing servers and over 50 URLs with illegal content have been reported as part of the campaign against audiovisual piracy. Figures from the 2016 Observatory on Piracy and Digital Content Consumption Habits show that the percentage of individuals watching football illegally has dropped from 21% to 18%, while the number of cases of illegal access to games in 2016 fell from 141 million to 122 million.