From motorcycles to baseball: soccer’s planetary battle against piracy

From the moment Gorka Llort joined Dorna Sports, the organizing company of the MotoGP World Championship, six years ago, he knew that one of his great challenges would be the fight against piracy. After starting the 2016 season as head of Social Networks, he soon realized that when his team uploaded content, especially in video format, the championship was the victim of a kind of sabotage. “Suddenly dozens of accounts flourished that offered our content in other ways and that for me, and also for Dorna, was a big problem because precisely my mission was to hook motorcycling fans through official channels,” he says. This intense and complex combat meant that a few years later, at the beginning of 2020, shortly after commanding the entire digital strategy of the organization, he decided to start working with LaLiga’s anti-piracy team, fifty specialists with whose intervention he is managing to turn the battle in his favor. “Since we have worked with them, we have been able to report more than 130,000 videos per year on social networks, of which 98% have been eliminated. They are very high numbers ”.

LaLiga Content Protection, the team responsible for Dorna’s anti-piracy services, is a department of the sports organization in which financial, technological and human resources have been invested for a long time. It is home to cybersecurity experts, developers, professionals versed in social networks or computer engineers who not only work to stop the illicit distribution of football matches – in the 2020/21 season they managed to reduce the number of illegal views of matches by 19%. to 2019/20—, but also offers its services to other players in the industry, such as the highest division of Belgian football, the Jupiler Pro-League or the Sky Sports chain in Mexico, as well as public institutions such as the Ministry of Culture . A list that Dorna Sports joined almost two years ago with the intention of safeguarding the value of the audiovisual rights of a championship that each season reaches 450 million homes in 200 countries.

“We had already been fighting piracy with another company, but we needed to improve the results. We decided to start working with LaLiga because of their experience and because the effectiveness of their services had already been proven in other fields. We also highly value the personalized work they offer, ”explains MotoGP’s director of digital strategy and content in Dorna.

To eradicate piracy beyond the confines of football, LaLiga makes its human and technological capital available to its clients. In the case of motorcycles, it is between two and three people who are always aware that there are no violations of the content. For this they use Marauder, a software that tirelessly searches the Internet and is able to find the place from which the signal starts and to know who is the owner of the domain to report it.

The busiest time occurs on weekends, when experts strive to stop the proliferation of pirated broadcasts of live races, either through social networks or through web pages accessed by search engines. In this field, Llort explains, the moments in which the competition starts are decisive. “Between minute zero and 15 of a race we are able to eliminate 85% of illegal accesses on social networks.” However, the effort to protect the content produced the rest of the week, from mini-documentaries to compilations of the most exciting moments, is gaining more and more importance in order to keep audience interest alive. In this regard, they say, they are capable of eliminating nine out of ten pirated content. A crucial result, Llort argues, “because our public and their way of consuming is changing and for us it is becoming increasingly important to generate other formats”.

The fight against fake official products

Since its launch six years ago, LaLiga Content Protection, LaLiga Tech’s subsidiary company to protect LaLiga and third-party content, has multiplied its workforce by 16, from three to fifty employees, and has expanded to Mexico, where A new office reinforces the existing one in Madrid. The department’s most innovative project has also been launched there a few months ago: the detection and subsequent reporting of the sale of fake official products on websites and e-commerce platforms thanks to Fuoco, a new tool trained to track this type of practices in the Net.

Innovation has been a perfect fit for the Tomateros de Culiacán, says Emma Sandoval, marketing director of the baseball club in this city of about 800,000 inhabitants, in the northwest of the country. “The sale of official products is one of our main sources of income. We have nine physical stores, soon we will open the tenth, all in Culiacán, and we make many shipments to the southern United States to people who buy in our store on-line. Before we tried to find these sites and report them ourselves, but it took us a long time and we were not effective, “he says on the phone.

Baseball is the third most popular sport behind soccer and boxing in Mexico, according to the consulting firm Mitofsky, and the Tomateros are the team with the most followers on social media. The good sporting course of the institution, which in the 2020-2021 season lifted the title of champion of the Mexican Pacific League (LMP) for the second consecutive year, has helped to relaunch its commercial image beyond a loyal fan that comes to a stadium with capacity for 20,000 spectators, reveals Sandoval. “If you walk through our city, you will surely come across a Tomateros cap. It has already transcended sport to become a fashion ”.

Although it is still too early to assess the effect of the collaboration with LaLiga – which began in September and has resulted in 601 de-indexed websites from the Google search engine and 686 fake ads and products removed from different sales sites – Sandoval It gives great peace of mind to have regular reports on the fraudulent sale of products that, in the end, are a fundamental lever to trigger the economic growth of the institution. “The problem of piracy is very serious and very serious and I think we have put ourselves on the right track to combat it.”

The expansion of the fight against piracy through this new tool that controls fraudulent sales, they estimate in LaLiga, is a demonstration of their commitment to eradicating a practice that during the past year and only in Spain caused in sports and in other sectors, losses of 2,416 million euros, according to the Anti-Piracy Observatory developed by the Coalition of Content Creators and Industries and published in October. “Behind this activity there is always someone who profits from the legitimate creators, so it is important to make efforts to stop it,” says the director of operations of LaLiga Content Protection, Emilio Fernández del Castillo.