We have all seen the well-known face of Christian “Bobo” Vieri who, in a television advert created by the Presidency of the Council and Agcom, warns a spectator, guilty of enjoying a football match through an illegal connection, now known to most people piece name.
The problem of online piracy, especially linked to football, is now a long-standing one, but in recent months there has been a crackdown on this issueas we reported in another article.
E on Thursday 7 December, on the occasion of the Juventus-Napoli cartel match, the Agcom anti-pezzotto platform should begin operating, the Communications Regulatory Authority. Let’s find out what it is.
The platform launches on December 7th
There is one more weapon against online piracy related to football.
After a test period, the Agcom platform will launch from Thursday 7 December (the day on which Juventus-Napoli will be played, valid for the Serie A football championship), which should guarantee the blocking of illegal flows within 30 minutes.
Why December 7th? To understand this, we need to start from a curious fact. Law 93 of 14 July 2023 against online piracy (in football but not only) has had several amendments. Included in the so-called Caivano decree, containing “urgent measures to combat youth hardship, educational poverty and juvenile crime”, published in the Official Journal on 14 November.
Initially the law required that the platform be “created within a maximum of six months from the convening of the technical table.” But an amendment halved the time: from six months to three. And the technical table was convened on September 7th.
The law and its amendments
As we wrote in the previous article, the law provides that Agcom, after reporting by those who hold the rights to a certain content, must ask operators to block pirated broadcasts within 30 minutes.
The platform that will be operational from 7 December is called Piracy Shield, and was donated in August by the Lega Calcio to Agcom.
Amendments to the law
However, as we were saying, there have been several amendments to the law against online piracy in football.
Amendments according to which it would be up to the providers to block any illegal transmissions, and Agcom – emptied of its initial authority – would only be informed of the action.
It also remains to be understood, which is no small thing, whether all providers have received adequate information, and are therefore ready to operate as early as December 7th.
A lot of them
Beyond this doubt, users of the piece now risk fines of up to 5,000 euros, and those who illegally transmit content can be punished with up to 3 years of imprisonment.
Furthermore, anti-pezzotto operations continue. In one of the most recent, a raid by the Financial Police identified an illegal transmission center for the SKY platform channels in Canosa di Puglia. 5 high-performance computers, 33 decoders and 12 encoders (a tool necessary to encode the encrypted signal) were installed in the power station.
The numbers of online piracy related to football
Meanwhile, interviewed by Gazzetta dello Sport, DAZN CEO Stefano Azzi provides merciless numbers on online piracy linked to football.
Azzi made it known that the Pezzotto system costs Italian football around 350 million euros a year.
Furthermore, Stefano Azzi recalled, “the research conducted by Fapav/Ipsos shows that the consumer public who illegally enjoys sport in our country is mostly concentrated among those with a higher level of education and among the employed . This tells us that piracy is a socially accepted fact.”
The numbers of piracy in Italy
More generally, two different recent studies report how the phenomenon of online piracy is growing.
According to the (European-wide) report “Online copyright infringement in the EU 2023” in Italy the phenomenon grew by 3.3%.
And the aforementioned FAVAP/Ipsos 2022 survey on audiovisual piracy in our country reports that the damage to turnover resulting from online piracy amounts to 1.7 billion euros. Further damage is the estimated loss of almost 10,000 jobs, especially among the youngest.