Yeah, it's hilarious that, on the same planet, we have articles like "Nine things I learned in ninety years" come out, while the courts of an EU country give "LaLiga," which appears to be a private corporation (a football company), the authority to ban any IPs they want arbitrarily, for everyone, country-wide. People just don't care any more, if ever did.
Couldn't they sue LaLiga for damages? Only because a court grants you some power you aren't absolved from the responsibilities that come with that power, or are you?
What complicates it is that the ISP, Telefonica, is also a Soccer rights-holder.
How they haven't sued La Liga for defamation is beyond me though; publicly condemning Cloudflare's role in enabling piracy by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit.
Traditionally all soccer organisations from FIFA down are absolutely rife with corruption and other criminal activity. Best to view current events through that lense. For example, Fifa in 2015 were done for bribery, fraud and money laundering to corrupt the issuing of media and marketing rights for FIFA games in the Americas, estimated at $150 million.
Sports have the kind of cultural power that you'd ordinarily only see from an organized, centralized, and probably Abrahamic religion. As a result they're able to commandeer the state in ways you'd only expect from an actual political party or an invading military force.
For example, it's common for sports teams in the US to browbeat cities into building them new sports-related infrastructure. Because they can threaten to move to LA, and then the public comment forms all get flooded with angry people who have no political opinion besides "WHY ARE YOU TAKING AWAY MY $SPORTSBALL_TEAM". This is papered over with a lot of excuses about "stadiums generating business revenue" (they don't lol) and people don't look too closely because nobody expects the sports people to be eating off the public dole like this.
The thing is, politicians also like sports because it's something that keeps people looking away from what they're doing. That's how sports leagues got to demand expensive stadiums in the first place. And every organization grows to fit its niche, because no one wants to take a paycut. So once sports leagues got used to having billionaire teams buying top talent to play in lavish taxpayer-funded stadiums, this sort of insane copyright nonsense becomes inevitable. LaLiga's business structure is too top-heavy to tolerate any amount of piracy. Anyone who isn't paying their tithe to the church of sportsball demands investigation, and anyone who obstructs such investigation is a threat to the sport.
If you're a Cloudflare customer who suffers damages when LaLiga obtains a DNS block for Cloudflare IPs used for pirate streams, you'll have better chances suing Cloudflare for failing to provide the service you're paying them for (of course if you're on a free plan, you don't have much of a leg to stand on).
One Cloudflare customer doing something illegal is only able to cause this much collateral damage because Cloudflare is set up so that taking down one customer requires taking down most of their infrastructure. But what works for DDoS protection doesn't work so well for legally mandated blocks. I think at some point Cloudflare will have to start kicking pirate streams off their platform faster if they want to stay up.
I'm not an ardent defender of Cloudflare by any means, but there is no grounds to sue Cloudflare. Their service is up. Their IP ranges are getting blocked by residential ISPs. How would that be Cloudflare's fault?
Because the reason they are getting blocked is because of the actions Cloudflare is taking. If cloudflare would stop streaming these pirate broadcasts, the blocking would stop. These blocks are not just random.
Anime has long had a model where shows are ‘free’ (historically, on broadcast TV) and the money comes from sales of disks, manga, and other merchandise. (On the other hand, Japan has copyright laws that make the US look laid back.)
To be fair for anime you can get pretty good coverage with only crunchyroll and a minimal price. Though some significant shows often end up locked on random services unfortunately.
those pirated anime (esp. speed subs) mostly also just steal the crunchyroll subtitles as well, so if it was awful there, it will be also awful in the pirated version!
To get subs in my language I do have to go to go-anime. Which is btw pretty bad (sometimes you have to reload 30 times before something starts, summaries are wrong, no chromecasting, etc.)
It's the same for anime, and guess what, I just pirate and pay no one.