Lega Serie A will leverage Meta's systems to find and disable online pirated content worldwide.
Meta and Italy’s top football league, Lega Serie A, are collaborating to fight online piracy of sporting events globally, showcasing the power of joint efforts between content owners and online platforms.
Lega Serie A has access to Meta’s free content management system, Rights Manager, which allows rights’ holders to protect their content worldwide, including live content in real-time. By leveraging this system, Lega Serie A can monitor when its content is uploaded to Facebook and Instagram globally, and automatically block online infringements easily.
In addition to these tools and systems, Meta maintains a robust program to proactively find and disable sporting piracy through automated systems without content owners having to find it themselves. This proactive effort can only exist with robust dialogue and collaboration from rights holders, which is the type of information that Lega Serie A is uniquely suited to provide.
Lega Serie A and Meta are also working on a number of ways Lega Serie A can report violating content for removal. In addition to traditional notice-and-takedown forms, Meta has also developed more sophisticated methods for reporting, such as the IP Reporting Center and the IP Reporting API. This API will allow rights holders such as Lega Serie A to build custom systems for reporting content that violates their intellectual property rights. Lega Serie A could use this API to streamline the reporting of infringing content by sending IP reports over Meta’s secure Graph API.
The pair say these achievements represent a new frontier in the fight against online piracy, one where premium content owners such as Lega Serie A and technology companies such as Meta continue to refine effective strategies to fight online live sports piracy. Lega Serie A and Meta believe that this collaboration will continue to set an example for the sporting industry on what can be achieved through engagement, active discussion and collaboration.
Commenting on the partnership, Lega Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo, said: “The collaboration with a technology company such as Meta is a decisive step forward in the no-holds-barred fight that we have been vigorously pursuing for years against online piracy. To stop this crime, which not only damages our industry but deprives it of substantial resources that would raise the level of entertainment for all fans, we are acting in every direction. I thank Meta for the support and automated tools made available, demonstrating not only that collaboration between rights holders and platforms is possible, but starting today the life of online pirates will be increasingly difficult.”
“We are proud to work with Lega Serie A to fight online piracy,” added Luca Colombo, Country Director for Italy at Meta. “Partnership, collaboration, and dialogue with content owners like them are the key to finding and removing online sports piracy. Meta is deeply committed to protecting intellectual property rights in the sporting industry, and we invest significant resources in doing so. For example, we’ve voluntarily built and developed advanced tools like Rights Manager, reporting APIs, in addition to our proactive efforts to find and disable piracy of sporting content – all at no cost to rights holders. Our on-going collaboration with Lega Serie A will help us refine these programs and serve as an example for the rest of the world on the best way to fight piracy.”
