Spain’s Internet Blocks Have A Flimsy Legal Basis, While Lacking Both Oversight & Accountability

from the stop-believing-the-copyright-industry’s-lies dept

Afew weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has been around for over 15 years now, has cost French taxpayers a fortune, and has never achieved any of its aims. As the Walled Culture post suggested, the latest court ruling might finally put the benighted scheme out of its misery.

But even if it does, there is already another disproportionately heavy-handed attempt to enforce copyright up and running in the shape of Italy’s Piracy Shield. It works by blocking access to unauthorized material using court orders against Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That would clearly be problematic, even if it were implemented properly, and well run. It is neither, as academic research from the end of last year underlined. Since the massive extension of its powers a year ago, things have gone relatively quiet on the Piracy Shield front in terms of new developments, and there are no signs that the Italian government has taken the many criticisms to heart.

That’s depressing enough, but even more worrying is that alongside France’s Hadopi fiasco, and Italy’s troubling Piracy Shield, Spain too seems intent on letting the copyright industry attack the Internet’s basic plumbing and thereby disrupt other sites, as well as downgrading the experience of thousands of innocent users. It’s increasingly clear that what’s happening in Spain is now a serious a threat to the operation of the online world there, but one that is still little-known. That makes a post from the Disruptive Competition Project (DisCo), which comes from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), particularly useful. Its title picks up on the similarities with Italy’s approach: “Repeating Failure: How Spanish Overblocking Ignores the Lessons of Italy’s Broken Piracy Shield”. Here’s what has been happening in Spain for over a year now:

Since early 2025, LaLiga (Spain’s top-tier football league) has been operating an aggressive and largely unchecked IP-address blocking regime in an attempt to tackle sports piracy. In 2024, LaLiga and several Spanish internet service providers (ISPs), some of whom have direct commercial interests in LaLiga broadcasting, sought a court order authorising the blocking of specific domain names.

They succeeded in this particular endeavour. However, LaLiga has thereafter continued to interpret this order as a green light to unilaterally select Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and domains to block, without ongoing court oversight or accountability.

It turns out that the legal basis of the current action is flimsy in the extreme:

The legal foundation of LaLiga’s anti-piracy enforcement model rests on a single, seven-page judgment issued by a Commercial Court in Barcelona on 18 December 2024. This ruling should have never been treated as setting a strong precedent, as it was not the result of a rigorous legal battle and didn’t seriously examine whether the blocking approach is lawful or proportionate under EU law.

As has happened so often in the world of copyright, the companies involved have taken a very narrow, and possibly flawed legal judgment and applied it as widely and broadly as possible, without asking further permission from the courts:

LaLiga now compiles and updates lists of IP addresses and domain names that it wants to see blocked. This process is completely opaque: these lists are not publicly disclosed, there is no independent technical or judicial validation before new addresses are added, and the court does not appear to continuously review any additions.

Once someone gets blocked, there is no redress mechanism to remove addresses from the list, even when they are no longer associated with infringing content, nor any appeal process for mistakenly blocked services.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that this cavalier approach has already led to the overblocking of sites, just as has happened in Italy because of Piracy Shield’s poor implementation:

LaLiga’s approach has caused widespread disruption, preventing access to tens of thousands of legitimate websites in recent years – including critical services such as payment providers and a national health operator. This disproportionate cost is borne by innocent third parties and small businesses, reflecting a mistaken belief that the commercial interests of one dominant party should trump Spanish consumers’ rights to a functioning internet.

The second of those overblocking incidents is particularly serious, since it involves a healthcare provider, which potentially puts people’s lives at risk. According to an article on La Razón (via Google Translate):

During the weekend of December 13-14, access to the Madrid Health website was blocked. While the duration of the access interruption and the message displayed upon entering the website varied depending on the internet service provider blocking access at LaLiga’s request.

Despite the serious nature of this overblocking, which effectively places the enforcement of copyright above protecting people’s health, the Spanish government is trying to wash its hands of the problem:

The situation has become so severe that members of the Spanish Parliament have sought explanations from the government. While acknowledging that the blocks have significantly impacted legitimate websites, the Spanish Government maintains that this is a judicial matter falling under the jurisdiction of the courts.

However, the courts seem to be entirely on the side of LaLiga, since they didn’t even give Internet companies a chance to present their side of the story earlier this year.

In February 2026, the Commercial Court of Córdoba even granted [LaLiga] an ex-parte preliminary injunction against NordVPN and ProtonVPN. This means the court issued a binding order, based solely on LaLiga’s arguments, without notifying those virtual private networks (VPNs) or allowing them to present a defence beforehand. The VPNs only discovered the judgment through the media and are now obliged to implement the blocks enforced by LaLiga.

It’s true that the same court has just rejected LaLiga’s request for coercive fines, and accepted that there was a technical dispute over whether the blocking could be implemented. But the refusal to allow the VPN companies to present a defense remains a deeply troubling precedent, and runs contrary to basic principles of justice. Moreover, as TorrentFreak reports, this latest ruling may be only a temporary reprieve for the VPN providers:

The league confirms that the decision merely sets aside the coercive fines while the proceedings continue, stressing that it does not exempt NordVPN from implementing IP blocks where LaLiga can prove piracy is taking place.

It is the usual one-sided justice that is typical when copyright is involved. It seems that LaLiga is being given carte blanche to do whatever it likes here, and never mind the consequences for Internet companies and their users. As Hadopi fades, and Italy’s Piracy Shield carries on as before, the fear has to be that Spain’s unconstrained approach to copyright enforcement could end up being worse than both.

There is currently a rare opportunity to comment on the issue of EU copyright enforcement in the realm of sports and other live events. There is an open Call for Evidence from the European Commission, which:

aims to collect the information necessary to support the review of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, and to seek feedback on the challenges linked in particular to the exercise of copyright and related rights in the context of technological developments and potential ways to address them.

As well as that general review of the main EU Copyright Directive, discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), and the issue of live streaming, the Commission is seeking people’s views on an important upcoming legislative proposal aimed at strengthening copyright (yet again) in the light of AI, which is planned for the first quarter of 2027. The Call for Evidence closes on 25 June, so you have a couple of weeks to hone your thoughts and submit them. Based on previous experience, we can probably expect the European Commission to ignore what anyone except the copyright industry thinks, but it’s worth a try.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Republished from WalledCulture.

Filed Under: copyright, france, hadopi, ip blocks, italy, piracy shield, spain

Companies: laliga, nordvpn, proton