Top French Football Leagues Win Pirate IPTV Blocking Orders

For pirate IPTV blocking orders to be effective, the time between spotting a domain or IP address to be blocked, and the blocking actually taking place, needs to be as short as possible.

For legal, practical, and technical reasons, the gap seems unlikely to shorten to the extent most rightsholders would like, but in general the process seems to be heading in that direction.

In an order dated July 26, top tier French football leagues Ligue 1 McDonald’s and Ligue 2 BKT requested blocking of dozens of domains linked to the provision of pirated live match streams. On August 2, the Paris Judicial Court issued a blocking order, having taken just a week, including a weekend, to process an application that could’ve taken weeks or months just a few years ago.

Permission to Tackle Piracy That Hasn’t Happened Yet

The 2024/25 first and second division football championships don’t even start until August 17, so the new order aims to tackle piracy that hasn’t happened yet. In the UK, the Premier League has been taking a similar approach for years, with the High Court – and now the Paris Court – weighing piracy services’ past behavior against the likelihood of piracy resuming when the new season begins.

“LFP welcomes this decision by the Paris Judicial Court, which makes it possible to combat piracy of the Ligue 1 McDonald’s and Ligue 2 BKT championships in their entirety,” LFP said in a statement welcoming the new order.

“While this decision is the fourth blocking injunction obtained by the LFP since the creation of the system to combat sports piracy in January 2022, it is the first to have been obtained before the start of a season, on the basis of findings of serious and repeated infringements of the LFP’s audiovisual exploitation rights during the previous season.”

Reacting to Countermeasures

Without the ability to respond quickly to countermeasures deployed by pirate sites and services, blocking orders would risk outliving their usefulness before the end of the first match. However, under Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, LFP has access to a powerful tool; after referring the matter to telecoms regulator ARCOM, new sites and services illegally broadcasting LFP content can be swiftly added to the existing blocklist.

On the website of the Paris Court, the domains authorized for blocking in the August 2 order initially appear somewhat chaotically, despite being the most important part of the order.

Fortunately, the list is repeated much more clearly at the end of the order so skipping directly to the end is advised. That being said, for reasons that don’t stop at sheer volume of domains, the need for clarity and pinpoint blocking will only increase moving forward.

Most of the complexities are directly connected to moves made by pirate sites as they attempt to avoid blocking, with any resulting confusion or uncertainty probably considered a bonus.

Domains and Subdomains

The domain list is quite specific when detailing exactly what should be blocked. For example, the domain lol-foot.ru appears along with the subdomain www.lol-foot.ru which currently lead to the same page, but that could be subject to change. The domain www.tv1337.buzz currently points to the same domain that lol-foot.ru and www.lol-foot.ru now redirect to (euro2024direct.ru)..

Sportplus.live and www.sportplus.live appear to redirect to a subdomain of sportplus.live that changes depending on the visitor’s geographical location. In the order fr22.sportplus.live is specified for blocking, but it would be trivial to switch that to almost anything else.

When visited directly, some domains on the list give the impression that they’re non-functional. That hasn’t stopped LFP from finding out that’s not actually the case, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see some of the tactics deployed.

When tested a few hours ago, visitors to bobres.net were greeted with nothing due to a lack of DNS records, while www.bobres.net (listed for blocking) remained fully functional. Another domain, kiwi-ip.tv, appears broken but the subdomain identified by LFP (app.kiwi-ip.tv) has a DNS record mapping it to ip.sltv.be. This domain/subdomain is also listed in the court order but visitors using a browser won’t find much since it’s probably configured for set-top boxes.

Visitors to ardenty.xyz might conclude that the domain is still parked but as LFP has clearly discovered, ahgs.ardenty.xyz is very much alive. The list goes on, and is always subject to change.

Careful….

Finally, it’s worth highlighting three similar domains/subdomains in the list that if blocked at the main domain level, risk affecting any number of innocent parties.

The domains/subdomains kooralive.pp.ua, www.kooralive.pp.ua, and www.kooralive1.pp.ua, all use pp.ua which appears to be a service offering free domains and currently has at least 270 subdomains.

Targeted blocking of the subdomains kooralive, www.kooralive, and www.kooralive1 should present no issues but if pp.ua was targeted in error, that would wipe out at least 270 services and probably more.

The list of fully-qualified domains (FQDN) as they appear in the order are listed below with the main domains and other related data appearing in the table underneath.

lol-foot.ru, www.lol-foot.ru, www.tv1337.buzz, sportplus.live, www.sportplus.live, fr22.sportplus.live, play-iptv.com, m3u.sf-m3u.me, premiumiptv.me, fbxc.cc, crackstreams.sbs, www.crackstreams.sbs, hes-goals.tv, www.hes-goals.tv, kooralive.pp.ua, www.kooralive.pp.ua, www.kooralive1.pp.ua, rojadirectaenvivo.re, www.rojadirectaenvivo.re, www.seehdgames.co, seehdgames.co, pre.soccerstreamslinks.com, vl.streameast.top, tarjetaroja.ws, www.tarjetaroja.ws, totalsportek.ai, www.totalsportek.ai, nbatvhd.online, www.nbatvhd.online, sportsbay.dk, www.sportsbay.dk, telerium.run, www.telerium.run, popcorniptv.com, ahgs.ardenty.xyz, www.bobres.net, ip.sltv.be, app.kiwi-ip.tv, dfwu.link, ip1.mypsx.net, supremtv.fr

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.