This weekend features the final round in the Premier League football season, but the league’s anti-piracy enforcement machine is showing no signs of slowing down.

On Wednesday, the Premier League took its legal concerns to a California federal court. Specifically, it requested a DMCA subpoena to compel domain registrar Tucows to identify the operators of a fresh batch of pirate sports-streaming sites.

Premier League’s Subpoena

The legal paperwork lists a web of pirate sports streaming domains and redirects, identifying 25 targets. Many of these sites use well-known sports pirate brands, including Totalsportek, Sportsurge, and Rojadirecta, which are not necessarily linked to the original operations.

Futbollibre.org was one of the most trafficked domains, with more than 12 million monthly visits last month, according to Similarweb. The domain, along with several others on the list, was already suspended and placed on “clienthold” roughly two weeks before the Premier League’s subpoena request, a registrar-level status that disables the domain.

Whether these suspensions were connected to the Premier League’s complaint is unknown. Other domains in the list remain online at the time of writing.

‘Disable Access’

According to the Premier League, these sites all streamed football matches without permission. This was also made clear in a copyright infringement notification that was sent to domain name registrar Tucows by the Premier League’s legal team at Hagan Noll & Boyle.

This notification is mandatory in order to obtain a DMCA subpoena and asks Tucows to disable the listed domains.

“Tucows is asked to remove or disable access to Premier League’s copyrighted works, which, based on the infringement that has occurred to date through the websites and domain names identified above, will continue to be infringed in this same manner throughout the Premier League season and into future seasons,” the letter reads.

Additionally, the legal paperwork includes a detailed investigation into the infringing nature of the sites. According to the Premier League, this paperwork is sufficient for a court clerk to sign the DMCA subpoena, without putting it before a judge.

Exposing the Operators

If the proposed DMCA subpoena is granted, it would require Tucows to share all personally identifying information it has on the registrants of these domains. That includes names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, emails, addresses, payment information, and account history.

At the time of writing, a court clerk has yet to sign off on the subpoena, which is typically a formality.

Whether DMCA subpoenas can reach intermediaries that don’t store infringing content has been contested before. Last year, the Ninth Circuit ruled that this route was not valid when movie companies used it to demand data from internet provider Cox, because it was a mere conduit for its subscribers’ traffic. How this logic applies to a registrar has yet to be tested.

The Streams Use Amazon and Google

At this point, it is worth pointing out that the pirated streams are not hosted on the domain names that are targeted in the subpoena. This is also evident from the Premier League’s own investigation package, which points to other American tech companies.

For example, the antenasport.org domain streamed the match between Fulham and Aston Villa from a backend link at Amazon Web Services. As shown below, the .m3u8 playlist was loaded through s3.dualstack.us-east-2.amazonaws.com. The same applies to content streamed from other domains.

Amazon is not alone, as Google’s cloud storage URL “storage.googleapis.com” also appeared in the evidence package, linked to a pirated stream for the Sunderland vs Nottingham Forest match.

Whether the Premier League also attempted to get information through these companies is unknown.

Regarding the Premier League’s DMCA subpoena request, Tucows informed TorrentFreak that it complies when legally required to.

“Tucows is a staunch advocate for free speech and the freedom of expression on the Internet however, when served with valid due process, like any business, Tucows complies,” writes Reg Levy, the company’s Associate General Counsel for Domains.

Tucows declined to comment further, citing potential ongoing or active investigations. For now, the Premier League’s request awaits a clerk’s signature. Whether the operators behind these sites are eventually unmasked is another question.

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The Premier League’s DMCA subpoena request is available here (pdf) , along with the notification of claimed infringement (pdf) , which were both filed at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.