Several ‘SportsBay’ Pirate Streaming Sites Go Dark In Wake of US Lawsuit
Several large live streaming sites sued by DISH Network for breaching the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have gone dark. SportsBay, the largest of the quartet, had around nine million visitors per month but an order issued by a Texas court requiring third-parties to hand over details of its operator may have set off alarm bells.
Most pirate IPTV services online today operate by accessing official broadcasts and streams, capturing them with dedicated equipment, and then restreaming video to the public from dedicated servers.
In an interesting complaint filed in a Texas court, DISH claimed that four sites doing business as SportsBay.org, SportsBay.tv, Live-NBA.stream, and Freefeds.com were offering sports broadcasts including the Olympics, NBA matches, NFL games, cricket and motorsports, we obtaining its content using a different method.
According to DISH, the SportsBay site operators are able to circumvent the DRM technologies deployed by subsidiary Sling TV’s streaming system in order to provide their users with Sling programming, directly from Sling’s servers, for free.
