Intelligence Piracy: The Match That Was Never Played

In the earlier articles in this series, we covered how, for decades, the fight against piracy has turned on one simple question: was the content copied?

It is the foundation on which much of copyright enforcement has been built. A film is copied. A television programme is rebroadcast. A football match is streamed without permission. In each case the infringement is visible, because the work itself has been reproduced.

The scale of that problem is enormous and still growing: during the 2024/25 season alone the English Premier League says it detected more than 645,000 infringing live streams and almost 900,000 unauthorised recorded clips of its matches ¹. Enforcement has kept pace, with coordinated raids such as the 2024 operation that dismantled an illegal service estimated to supply 22 million households across the UK and Europe ².