Some stories the Latin Advertising, Media and Business World is talking about this week:
» Rojadirecta fights U.S. government. Spanish sports-streaming site rojadirecta.com is fighting a U.S. government web seizure, paidcontent reports.
The company that owns Rojadirecta, Puerto 80, filed a formal letter of objection within a few days of the seizures, back in February. After Rojadirecta’s lawyers navigated a bizarre maze of bureaucracies, it ultimately engaged the government in negotiations, but those negotiations ended in a stalemate. “On May 26, 2011, following weeks of prolonged negotiations, the government rejected Puerto 80’s offers to compromise, and informed Puerto 80 that it would not agree to return the domain names unless Puerto 80 agreed not to host or permit its users to link to any U.S. content anywhere on its sites anywhere in the world,” the company’s petition states. The Rojadirecta website—still up at alternative domain names like rojadirecta.es—offers users a wide array of links to live and recorded sports matches, including many U.S. sports matches that don’t appear to be authorized for internet broadcast. However, in its court papers, Rojadirecta notes that it does not host or stream any material itself, and describes itself as “essentially an online discussion group” that “indexes links to streams of sporting events that can already be found on the internet.” Rojadirecta is among the top 10 most visited sites in Spain with 865,000 unique users. Its traffic has decreased by 30% since the U.S. governments web seizure.
