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?
Ticket ToS (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this actually a question (Score:0, Insightful)
I have my downloading fun as much as the next person, but are we actually at the point with this generation that somebody is asking a genuine question: "Company paid $3billion for rights to something; can I take it, distributive it massively for free, or is it for some strange reason a violation of copyright?"
Of bloody course it is. Don't be daft.
What can they do about it is another question entirely; but let's not delude and be dishonest with ourselves, whatever our opinions may be on morality of the situation or what _should_ be the case, whether taking somebody else's content and reposting is legally OK under current laws in much of the world.
Re:PL = Honorable Institution. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Blackie" in the UK is a racist and offensive term - he is employed and works in the UK, so he is subject to UK laws and levels of standards with regard to his actions in the UK. Oh, and he said a lot more than just calling Evra a "blackie" - I suggest you refresh your memory of the incident...
Besides, Luis Suarez should be permanently banned from professional football for his various issues over the years. He is uncontrollable and has absolutely no conscience with regard to his past actions.
US NFL aggressively enforces copyright (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Pinch of salt needed (Score:5, Insightful)
... under UK Copyright law there is no "fair use" exception
That is correct. There are some specific exceptions, commonly referred to as "fair dealing" over here, and there have been some recent developments that will expand the scope of the exceptions, but there is no generic limitation on copyright determined by a set of qualitative tests like the Fair Use rules in the US. However, if we're talking about someone's own footage of the goals, the more important issue might be what the contract was when they bought their admission ticket.
If the conditions of entry clearly say no recording is allowed and that if any recordings are made anyway then all rights are assigned to the organisers, then my expectation is that the uploaders won't have a leg to stand on here. It would be very surprising in this day and age if such terms weren't routinely included, and I fully expect that this is how any debate about legality will wind up being resolved.
On the other hand, if there's nothing prohibiting the use of recording devices and nothing claiming any rights over recordings made by spectators, it might be tough to argue successfully in court along the lines that someone's personal recording was a copy or derivative work of some official recording that the organisers sell to TV networks. It's not an unprecedented idea: publishing photos of major public landmarks like the Hollywood sign or Eiffel Tower can be legally hazardous, particularly if commercial use is involved. However, those restrictions tend to result from some carefully contrived/created edge cases in the legal position for specific places, and it's hard to see how anything similar applies to a football match.
(IANAL so obviously you shouldn't trust anything you just read if it actually matters to you.)