The Premier League has begun a crackdown on sharing goalmouth videos through Vine and other social media platforms, however it is suspected they have started an unwinnable fight.
The Premier League has billed itself as being exciting and unmissable – but has now made clear that sometimes, it must be missed and has refused to allow all matches to be televised in order to ensure the stadiums remain busy.
This has resulted in fans creating their own broadcasts of the games using social media platforms such as Vine. This allows all fans to experience the game without having to go to the stadium.
In response to this, the premier League has begun serving takedown notices for breaches of intellectual property rights. Furthermore, it has also been working on the development of gif crawlers and Vine crawlers to target the problem and it also working with Twitter.
Sysomos, a tool designed to track sharing on social media has recorded 19,000 references to various search terms of football goals over the past six months, however there have been hundreds of thousands of Vines featuring premiership stars. Theses are often inconspicuously labeled to evade the law.
Broadcast rights for the Premier League have generated £3 billion over the course of the last three years and thus it is understandable that the Premier league wishes to protect this revenue, however, despite this recent crackdown it will be impossible to keep up with the emerging videos and social media platforms. The volume of takedown notices that the Premier League would be required to serve to stamp out this problem is entirely unmanageable.
Infringement of intellectual property rights in relation to football is not consigned to the Premier League, Viaccess-Orca, an online piracy monitoring service, estimated that 20 million people illegally viewed football content during the World Cup.
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