LaLiga scores yet another victory in the fight against piracy. Justice has sentenced lateete.tv for offering free matches of our main national football competition at club level.
Javier Tebas and his Technological Content Protection department have been fighting hard against piracy in recent years and have now been able to condemn a pirate site that attracted more than 200,000 pirate users per month.
Judgment favorable to LaLiga
The Court of Instruction No. 1 of Zamora against the owner of the website www.latelete.tv for which the convicted person will be obliged to pay a fine of 90,000 euros to LaLiga, in addition to recording a sentence of 6 months in prison as the author of a crime against intellectual property.
Camp Nou
According to statements by LaLiga Content Protection (technological subsidiary of LaLiga): “These sentences are a great support to LaLiga’s fight for the protection of content. The reality of piracy is that it is not a Robin Hood that offers free content altruistically, but behind it are organizations that profit, and a lot, from the work of legitimate creators, thus eliminating jobs. They also do it through a black market outside of taxes, thus harming the whole of society in general”.
This is the latest in a series of actions that have been carried out in recent months, in which the persecution of pirate football has been one of the numerous actions carried out by the organization of football clubs chaired by Javier Thebes.
LaLiga has its own Department of Technological Content Protection, in which some twenty experts work and which it has even shared with other sports organizations such as Dorna Sports (MotoGP), the Jupiler Pro-League of Belgium or the Ministry of Culture of Spain.
Losses amounting to 300,000 euros
The condemned man, who goes by the initials ANM, set up the website lateete.tv as a platform that offered links for viewing not only football matches (LaLiga, Copa del Rey, Second Division, Champions League, Premier League, Bundesliga and Series A), but another series of content protected by copyright that was broadcast in a pirated way, such as bullfights or basketball, tennis and handball matches.
Losses of hundreds of thousands of euros for LaLiga
The damages caused to LaLiga exceeded 300,000 euros during the uninterrupted activity that “latelete.tv” maintained between June 2014 and February 2018 thanks to the publicity that the owner obtained, which reached more than 200,000 users per month.
The Prosecutor’s Office points out that the defendant sought to position himself in the different Internet search engines so that fans of the different sports he offered could access his website and thus increase the number of advertisers in his social network.
The defendant initially denied having created the website and used the closed links to do his own business. During the police and judicial investigation, he stated that his identity had been supplanted to disassociate himself from the crime against intellectual property with which he was charged and that, finally, he admitted having committed minutes before the trial began.
LaLiga detected the case and undertook an investigation that ended up causing the National Police to intervene in the website and close it by order of the Court. The conviction of the Investigating Court No. 1 of Zamora, in addition, disqualifies the defendant for six months from the creation and management of companies related to sound or television broadcasting rights, and interactive services.
