Premier League and Football Association add more pirate sites to banned list

Premier League bans sports streaming pirate sites — Popular sports streaming pirate sites blocked in the UK iStock

The Premier League and Football Association have asked major Internet Service Providers in the UK to block access to a bunch of new pirate websites well known for sports streaming. The newly blocked pirate domains include 3pmstream.com, ifirstrowuk.eu and rojadirecta.es.

In December 2015, six major ISPs in the country had banned more than 85 pirate sites including Pirate Bay and TorrentHound. In several cases, these blocks turned out to be quite effective, but the operators of some sites found alternative routes to bypass these restrictions.

These bans are as a result of a high court order to major ISPs to block sites offering links to pirated content. Following complaints from the Football Association (FA) and Premier League (PL) several sports streaming sites such as FirstRow, Rojadirecta, Live TV and Drakulastream had earlier been blocked. Recently, the FA and PL submitted a bunch of new pirate sites that were added to the ISPs' filter, says TorrentFreak.

Surprisingly, Firstrows.eu, which is FirstRow's most popular site in the UK, has not been added to the new list of pirate sites. Despite the bans, the FirstRow owner had earlier said, "Our site uses third-party players, so blocking FirstRow will not stop the streams, as these will still be accessible online. They are saying that FirstRow is illegal, but our site is indexing streams that are available on the web, which is free information."

"FirstRow will remain accessible for all other countries, and UK users can use proxies or the thousands of other websites like ours that remain open," he added. Given below is the list of newly blocked pirate websites shared by TorrentFreak.