Azzi, CEO of Dazn: “That money from illegal access is equivalent to the sum of the wages of five top champions”. The phenomenon is not perceived as a crime
The countdown is almost over and the “right” date should be Friday 7 December. The Caivano Law Decree, published in the Official Journal on 14 November, provides that the platform necessary to block illegal sites will be operational starting from the day Juve-Napoli will be played in Turin. This is good news in the fight against piracy which, after the approval of the new law by Parliament last July, has not actually started yet. In a few days, however, the… change of gear that broadcasters and the Lega Serie A have long called for given the over 350 million euros (“A million a day” has been remarked several times by the CEO of Lega, Luigi De Siervo) who are lost every year by the football system due to the “pezzotto” and the sites that illegally broadcast our championship.
Stages and risks
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The anti-pirate platform is currently being tested by AgCom after the League donated it to the Authority in August and after the technical table for the definition and sharing of the security requirements was established in September. operation of the platform itself. The process to begin to weaken the criminal network, therefore, is at a turning point: when it is fully operational the platform will allow illegal IPs to be blocked within 30 minutes of their identification and will allow the Financial Police and the Postal Police to trace the people who illegally use the contents. This process is mandatory to fight the most sophisticated and dangerous crime, the one that operates through hackers capable of stealing the TV signal from the most important international realities. Those who use sports and entertainment content illegally do not know that their data, shared to purchase a pirated subscription, can then easily be used, for example, for withdrawals from their current accounts and unauthorized payments. In addition to incurring criminal charges and fines, those who frequent pirate sites put their digital identity at risk, use a service managed by hackers on their smartphone or PC and compromise their devices, with the risk of becoming recipients of scams.
Worrying numbers
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Stopping piracy in sport has become mandatory after the data released by the latest Fapav/Ipsos research which certified the constant increase in illegal acts over the last few years: it went from 14.7 million in 2017 to almost 41 million in 2022 The increase from 2021 to 2022 was 26%, but compared to 2017 the growth was 178%. There are almost 8 million occasional pirates and each of them carries out at least 5 acts of piracy a year, thus financing illegal platforms (which impoverish the Serie A product) and damaging both clubs and true fans. Also worrying is the data linked to illegal IPTVs, which are the most used digital platform: subscribers to these illicit platforms are 3 million or 6% of the Italian population over 15 years of age. Piracy has unfortunately become a “positive” social phenomenon and is mistakenly perceived as a small exception to the rule, not as a crime. The CEO of Dazn, Stefano Azzi, elaborated on the concept: “The value that the Serie A ecosystem loses every year is enormous and the figure is more or less equivalent to the sum of the salaries of the highest paid stars in the world. We are talking about champions like Messi, Haaland, Mbappé, Neymar and De Bruyne. We are facing a major cultural problem. The research conducted by Fapav/Ipsos shows that the public of consumers who illegally enjoy sport in our country is mostly concentrated among those who have a higher level of education (graduates, ed) and among the employed. This tells us that piracy is a socially accepted fact.”
Research
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Search engines, social networks, messaging apps, blogs or forums continue to be platforms used both to find out where to illegally consume audiovisual content and to see it directly. On social media (just to name a few: Facebook, Instagrambut also Telegram) it is extremely easy to come across offers that promote the illegal viewing of content and which collect hundreds of undisturbed interactions. It is clear that with such a “framework” the commitment of the institutions, the League and the broadcasters cannot be enough: to counter this phenomenon there is probably also a need to subject the world of social media to more stringent responsibilities.
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