In what will come as bad news to those football fans who watch their football for free on the Internet the sports streaming site Wizwig has been forced to shut down citing the Premiership as one of the main reasons why.
You can read the statement they posted below:
Today is a sad day for all fans of live sports streaming, as we at Wiziwig have to announce that we’re forced to close our website, at least for now. This due to new laws in Spain which will get into force starting tomorrow, the 1st January 2015. Failing to comply with the new reform puts us at risks of fines being as high as € 600.000,- and also losing our domain, hosting and other necessary stuff to operate wiziwig.
We’ve chosen to operate from Spain, as several higher court cases there have declared linking to be legal. This has given us the opportunity to run wiziwig for 3 years. Nevertheless it hasn’t been easy to operate as since we’ve started we’ve been facing a lot of pressure, like fake claims of being unlawful, being pirates, pressure on hosting, advertising and much more.
Main threat has been the English Premier League, who’ve tried literally anything to shut our website down, to cease our revenues, spread false accusations and who has constantly been chasing us down. Needless to say that this has cost us a lot of time and money to fight against these fake claims and fake accusations. It also made it more difficult to run advertisements to pay our expenses, and the same applies for donating which has been made impossible. But we still decided to continue to run this website to provide you with the best links to watch live and free sports on the internet.
However, since a year Spain has been working on a new law, later followed by another law and proposals to stop the linking on the internet. Several weeks ago, in November, a main part of this new law had been approved, and it will go in affect as from the 1st January 2015. As you might have heard, 2 weeks ago Google News already decided to close their operations in Spain because of parts of this new law. Several other linking sites in Spain decided to close as well in the past weeks.
