NFT: Crazy story: piracy of beINSports Cable Telecasts of Premier

League, recent World Cup, UEFA and other telecasts.

Slow day, but this is fascinating to me: Qatar is accusing a Saudi Arabian controlled network of stealing the Qatari-owned beIN Sports cable telecasts of multi-billion $$ soccer properties. Qatar has been embroiled in a hot dispute with SA and UAE over alleged Qatar support for Iranian terror in the ME, mirroring Shia-Sunni enmity.

This story also embroils high profile, white shoe US law firms retained to represent the alleged pirater beoutQ, alleged to be controlled by Saudi state controlled broadcaster, as well as Cisco, one of three tech firms retained by beIN Sports to identify the origin of the pirated telecasts.

Quote:

All 10 games played on the opening weekend of the Premier League last weekend were broadcast on beoutQ, a sophisticated Arab-language channel whose brazen theft of sports broadcasts has emerged as a high-profile battleground in the bitter and protracted dispute between Qatar and a group of its neighbors led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates....For about a year, those games and others, including matches in the Champions League and all 64 games of this summer’s World Cup in Russia, have been stolen wholesale and retransmitted by the bootleg beoutQ network. BeIN Media Group said this week that tests carried out by three technology firms had revealed what it called “irrefutable proof” of its long-held position linking the beoutQ signal to the satellite provider Arabsat, a Riyadh-based company in which Saudi Arabia is the largest investor.

Officials of soccer associations, including FIFA, UEFA, and LaLiga are initiating calls to the Saudi network to cease its lucrative piracy operation.

Quote:

“Pirate broadcasts attack directly at the economic heart of the sport and we must unite in our struggle against this practice,” said Didier Quillot, the executive director general of the French league. “We ask Arabsat and Saudi Arabia to intervene to stop the piracy of our contents.” Saudi Arabia and Arabsat have denied any involvement with beoutQ, which claims on its website to be a joint Colombian and Cuban venture. There is, however, mounting evidence to suggest it is a Saudi-based operation: Its website is geolocked, or restricted, to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s most-populous country; the set-top boxes embossed with the channel’s logo can be purchased in Saudi cities; and online payments are accepted only in Saudi riyals. Perhaps most damning of all, social media posts promoting the channel provide details on which Arabsat frequencies the channel is available. “The evidence is irrefutable,” said Sophie Jordan, beIN Media Group’s legal counsel. “On a daily basis it is carrying out — in broad daylight — a mass-scale theft of highly valuable intellectual property rights.”

Quote:

Saudi Arabia has also been lobbying international sports organizations to end their agreements with beIN Sports, frustrating those unwilling to be drawn into what they consider a political, rather than a sporting, dispute. In the middle of the World Cup, for example, Saudi Arabia’s sports minister, Turki al-Shiekh, took to Twitter to call on FIFA to break its contract with beIN, before making a personal attack on the European soccer head Aleksander Ceferin. Ceferin’s organization, UEFA, had a few hours earlier released a statement saying beoutQ was based in Saudi Arabia and had been pirating its content. FIFA announced last month that it had hired lawyers to take action specifically in Saudi Arabia, and it said that the organization “is working alongside other sports-rights owners that have also been affected to protect its interest.” BeIN is relying on the help; while it has begun legal actions in the United States and France, it has been unsuccessful in its attempts to find lawyers willing to represent its interests in Saudi Arabia because of the broader embargo.

A lot more interesting stuff in this NYT article. As usual, BBI can not accommodate the link in hyperlink form ([/url] cuts off).

[url]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/sports/qatar-saudi-arabia-beoutq-bein-sports.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fsoccer& action=click& contentCollection=soccer& region=stream& module=stream_unit& version=latest& contentPlacement=2& pgtype=sectionfront[/url]