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Spanish Football League Defends Phone 'Spying' (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Spanish football league La Liga has defended the privacy policy of its app after admitting it was accessing the microphone and GPS of Android users. It said it had been trying to track down venues illegally broadcasting matches, by matching audio data and phone location. The app, downloaded more than 10 million times on the Google Play Store, has been criticised by fans. La Liga said it wanted to "protect clubs and their fans from fraud." The broadcasting of football matches in public places without a paid licence cost the game an estimated 150 million euros ($177m) a year, it said. The new function was enabled on Friday, 8 June.
I love when people pretend that the full, purchase price of "pirated" material is what they "lost" due to piracy, as if every single person WOULD have paid, and paid full price, if they couldn't "pirate" it. Sure, you can make whatever argument you like about the importance of paying creators, intellectual property rights, and so on, but the idea that every single person who watched or listened WOULD have paid, and COULD have, had "piracy" not been an option is absurd. A better estimate might be the same proportion of the general population that paid, as a percentage of the total. If 25% of the people paid to watch something, it's a fair guess that the loses due to those who watched (or listened, or read, or played, etc.,) amount to that same percent of the total who watched, so if out of 100 million people, 25 million paid, and 1 million people watched but didn't pay, they didn't lose 1 million times whatever they would have paid, they MAYBE lost about 250,000 times that.
Unless of course, MOST people watched or listened, etc., and didn't pay, in which case, sure... that might throw off the numbers. Because SURELY there are plenty who would be willing to watch if it were free, (and when they can find a way to watch for free, they do,) but who wouldn't PAY to watch, and if they couldn't watch for free, they simply wouldn't watch. But the people complaining about this are almost certainly acting as if they can safely operate on the assumption that ALL the people who watched for free, WOULD have paid, to inflate the numbers to try to wring every last penny or... Europenny, or whatever, in this case, because like any other for-profit business, they don't care about anything but the money, which on balance, is fine, I suppose, but when they and their owners have millions and billions of Eurodollars or whatever, it's hard to muster a lot of sympathy when a group of poors huddles over a single radio or TV, and watch without "paying" for it. The legalistic interpretation that leaves no room for anything but market forces and uses political power and state violence to enforce rules that benefit them is not really something I can cheer for.