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Posting Soccer Goals On Vine Is Illegal, Say England's Premier League
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?
Even if thee free publicity would lead to more people watching and consuming soccer-related products and services in the long run, It's always good to see honorable institutions such as the Premier League inciting everyone to be a good citizen and abide the law, at the cost of them losing money. A true example to follow.
In the United States, you are definitely allowed to show a short clip of the the guy starting at the kick and ending at the goal.
Merely putting a comment under the video is unlikely to help your legal case in any country. But burning a voice over into the video would add 'original content' to it, and that might give you more rights.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What terms of service do you agree to when you purchase a ticket and attend the event? Do you agree not to take and post videos of the event?
Speaking for U.S. law, you understand copyright wrong. The fair use doctrine allows for use of copyrighted works for the purpose of "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research".
Part of the criteria for determining if use of a copyrighted work is fair use includes the "amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole", so, for example, if I were to post a Vine video of a goal, along with commentary like "Manchester United played a great game today, with three goals including this exciting one by Bob Smith", then I am (your pick) commenting, critiquing, or reporting on the entire hour and a half game, while posting a five second clip of that game. In the U.S., that is clearly fair use unless the other side's lawyers have more money than you do.
I realize this story is about England, but I'm relatively certain that every Slashdot commenter including the parent is discussing this in terms of U.S. law, so I did as well.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
They'll have to claim the fix the games to make them interesting, and that it's performance art and not competition perhaps.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
They are claiming copyright over their own footage.
The phenomena at question is that of people uploading mobile phone footage of TV footage, not of their own video of the match.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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...
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.
... 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.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is something called a "fair dealing" excemption that is recognized for british copyright.
Theres a case that pretty much specifically shows the premier league hasn't a leg to stand on.
Back in 1991 the BBC sued British Satelite broadcasting for showing clips of between 14 seconds to 30 seconds of goals , sometimes in slow motion, and the like from the 1990 world cup taken from BBC footage. The BBC said it had exclusive rights from FIFA therefore the BSB had no rights to rebroadcast the clips.
The court disagreed and found that the short clips where covered under fair dealing provisions and that it was ok to take the small clips and rebroadcast it.
Further under the Restricted Practice Act its possible to show that such exclusivity deals can *sometimes* be considered invalid as anti-trust , particularly if the exclusivity is for pay-to-view events covered under scheduled Listed Events.
In a nutshell, I suspect this is an empty threat and the premier league would have trouble convincing a court that a contract between it and the exclusive broadcaster somehow binds a third party who never agreed to it and thus has recourse to normal rights associated with copyright fair dealing.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.