Premier League claims responsibility for the closure of Reddit Soccer Streams
The Premier League was at the heart of the decision to shut down Reddit Soccer Streams, which was − until fairly recently − an extremely popular online forum for people looking to live stream football illegally, it has emerged.
It isn’t clear how big a role the Premier League played in getting Soccers Streams banned, but the incident has been listed amongst its most significant piracy-related achievements over the past year.
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“Over the last 12 months, the Premier League has continued to pursue a broad and multi-faceted approach to the enforcement of its IP rights, including by… Working with Reddit to close its ‘soccerstreams’ thread, a forum that provided links and tips for accessing pirate content, and which boasted over 420,000 subscribers,” the latest IP Crime and Enforcement report, which was published by the Intellectual Property Office on September 5, has revealed (via TorrentFreak).
The closure of Reddit Soccer Streams represented a massive win for anti-piracy campaigners.
In January, the Reddit Soccer Streams’ moderators banned all submissions from users, after “the Reddit Admins got in touch with us about an [impending] ban of this subreddit if changes weren’t made.”
However, a short while later Reddit Soccer Streams was banned outright.
In its place is a message that reads: “r/soccerstreams has been banned from Reddit. This subreddit has been banned for violations of Reddit’s Copyright Repeat Infringement Policy.”
Back to the IP Crime and Enforcement report, which adds that “In Season 2018/19 the Premier League removed or blocked over 210,000 live streams and over 360,000 clips of its matches that would otherwise have been available to view in the UK”, and that in the same period it “conducted investigative visits to over 6,000 unique commercial premises”, in an attempt to clamp down on any pubs, clubs and other commercial premises televising Premier League games illegally.
Also listed amongst the Premier League’s biggest achievements of recent times is Ronaldo7’s decision to stop posting links to illegal Premier League streams.
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“Basically, they have told us that if we didn’t stop posting/sharing links to Premier League games, they would try to get our site blocked (in regions/countries they didn’t specify),” Ronaldo7’s administrator told Trusted Reviews back in March.
“The Premier League legal department sent me an email in February and we decided to stop posting links to Premier League games a few days after, in order to avoid the escalation of the pressure.”
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
