Dear Visitors of WiZiWiG
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.
For all those interested in the reasons behind this decision please read further below.
Wiziwig is a free service, which has been started over 3 years ago and for those who always wondered, we will first explain the meaning of wiziwig:
What You See Is What You Get
WYSIWYG, easier to remember we decided to change it into WIZIWIG. The aim of wiziwig has always been to provide you (everyone) with links to watch live and free sports online, whereever you live. We've also chosen to act as a normal company, as we still believe that linking to other websites isn't wrong, isn't against any law and should be possible without having to hide ourselves behind a proxy or fake registrations.
It's therefore that 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 unlawfull, 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 heared, 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 aswell in the past weeks.
Main reason is the ridiculous part of the law that forces sites to follow a strict DMCA policy, in which you need to act within 3 days after receiving a complaint, failing to do so will result in an adminstrative party (the ministry of culture) judging about the complaint. They can then force your domain to be blocked, make your website inaccesible, hosting to be shut down, ads to be removed and bank accounts to be closed. After a second complaint fines of 600.000 euros will be given. You might think there should be ways to workaround the law, but there's also a part that states that after a complaint of party "x", all possible "illegal" content of that party "x" has to be removed and kept removed, failing to do so makes you again facing all the penalties as decscribed above. As this all goes by bypassing jury or judge (law court), the risks have become too high to continue our website. To fully trust an administrative party judging about complaints is impossible, especially with the pressure we've been facing and the fake complaints and unlawful acting of other parties to get us down. We can't give our faith in the hands of a third party.
In addition to this Spain is also working on a new criminal justice "law", which they expect to be approved somewhere in 2015. In this new criminal law owners of websites who link to other websites, and who get complaints, may face 6 years in jail.
All together this has made us decide to stop with Wiziwig at the end of 2014, before the start of the new year, to be fully safe and to see how things will work out. We will now focus on new things, maybe we will return one day but for now we would like to say once again thank you for your trust in Wiziwig. Despite this bad message we still wish everyone all the best in 2015!
Thanks for visiting Wiziwig and for your loyalty. As said above already, time will tell if we return in the future.
Wiziwig.tv Closes
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Re: Wiziwig.tv Closes
Originally Posted by beerman
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