The Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport teams up with LaLiga in the battle against online piracy

Today LaLiga and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport have signed an agreement under which they will step up the battle to protect intellectual property and the fight against piracy online. As Fernando Benzo, the secretary of state for culture, and LaLiga president Javier Tebas explained in a press conference after putting pen to paper, the partnership is the "first step" taken by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and the Liga Nacional de Futbol Profesional in order to achieve a "greater level of efficiency" in defending the rights of intellectual property owners.

As part of the deal, LaLiga is giving the Ministry free access to a specially adapted version – geared towards the cultural industries – of the proprietary software it uses to combat piracy in sport. This tool will allow the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission to improve levels of speed and efficiency in the investigative process of defending intellectual property rights. LaLiga will also provide training for officials at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, and in more concrete terms, for members of the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission, the department responsible for the administrative process of protecting copyright online, in order to ensure efficient usage of this tool.

"This agreement was necessary. At LaLiga we have access to so many resources and we want to leverage them to benefit society through this partnership with the Ministry. This tool is key in the anti-piracy battle which LaLiga is deeply invested in," stated Javier Tebas during the press conference.

The culture-specific anti-piracy software will facilitate the process of identifying, describing and locating websites that are guilty of copyright infringement, whether for financial gain or not. The program makes it possible to identify URLs hosting works that have been the subject of rights infringements and specify the method, be it through downloads, streaming or other.

The software allows for the automatic identification of page owners who are responsible for infringements, as well as the intermediaries that provide services to these sites, including advertising or electronic payment services.

The process of identifying websites hosting illegal cultural content has been a particularly complex one for the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission. With LaLiga's software, cases that up until now have taken between one and eight months to be resolved, could be taken care of in 15 minutes. Even when taking into account the commission's commitment to thorough procedures that uphold the rule of law and guarantee constitutional rights, the timescale for individual cases is expected to drop by 50% compared with current figures.