Posting Soccer Goals On Vine Is Illegal, Say England's Premier League 226
New submitter JonnyCalcutta writes: The football Premier League in England is warning about posting clips of goals on online services such as Vine and Twitter. The claim is that posting these clips is "illegal under copyright laws." I'm naturally dubious about blanket statements from rightsholders already known to push the truth, especially concerning such short clips, but I don't know enough about copyright law to understand the implications fully. Is it illegal? What can they actually do about it? Does adding commentary give the uploader any rights to post?
Re: Pinch of salt needed (Score:3, Interesting)
They'll have to claim the fix the games to make them interesting, and that it's performance art and not competition perhaps.
Re:Is there a barrister in the house? (Score:5, Interesting)
British copyright law really isn't that weird, perhaps the most weird things about it are the desperate attempts by police to take down piracy websites using fraud laws because it's the closest thing they could find - a tactic which has only netted them mixed success at best. British copyright law is actually fairly typical because it's based on the Berne convention like that of most countries. The Premier League is clearly arguing that Fair Dealing does not exist under UK law, which is patently false.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Posting short snippets of a match on Twitter could arguably fall under any of the fair dealing exemptions, though at least 3 of them it seems to clearly fall under - i.e. criticism, review, and reporting of current events. The argument that such posts are for research are tenuous, but not impossible to make, but the argument that they fall under criticism, review, and reporting of current events seem to be pretty bulletproof.
Provided there is no commercial gain in the posting, and provided people stick to small snippets of just the goals then it seems pretty clear that the Premier League is outright lying and should simply be told to go fuck itself. Fair Dealing also requires that the original work already be available to the public in the first place, but that's also a given given that the whole fucking point in such football matches is that they're a public performance - the guys on the pitch aren't playing for shits and giggles like kids in a schoolyard, they're playing to make money and entertain, that is after all why they have stadiums and cameras around them that also then make a fortune broadcasting the event across the globe to millions of people, so the Premier League clearly can't use that argument either.
Given that the reason people post goals in the first place is to say "What an amazing goal!" or "What a shit goal!", given that the performances are clearly available to the public to start with (anyone can pay to see one live or on TV), and providing no commercial motive then I don't see how the Premier League could ever possibly argue that this isn't a legitimate use of the criticism or review clauses against the performance in question.
Re:PL = Honorable Institution. (Score:3, Interesting)