European Court Says Leagues Don't Hold Copyright On Sporting Events
from the whoa dept
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a case in which a woman from the UK who owned a pub was in a legal fight with the UK Premier League (football or soccer, depending on what you think the sport should be called) concerning the use of a foreign satellite decoder. Basically, the pub owner, Karen Murphy, felt that the rates charged by Sky Sports & ESPN were crazy high... and found that she could buy a much, much cheaper decoder from a Greek source... and that would work and allowed her to show the games. The league went after her, but she argued that blocking her ability to buy and use a foreign decoder card was an illegal restraint on trade:What struck me as much, much, much more interesting, however is this part of the ECJ's ruling:
The judges said the Premier League could not claim copyright over Premier League matches as they could not considered to be an author's own "intellectual creation" and, therefore, to be "works" for the purposes of EU copyright law.I've always wondered about this. As you may know, in the US, various sports leagues always claim copyright not just over the games, but even "any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game" at times. That's clearly an overreach of copyright law. But, in this case, the court seems to be saying that the league can't own anything about the games at all. Instead, it says that it can only hold copyright on additional artwork it creates above and beyond the events:
However, the ECJ did add that while live matches were not protected by copyright, any surrounding media, such as any opening video sequence, the Premier League anthem, pre-recorded films showing highlights of recent Premier League matches and various graphics, were "works" protected by copyright.The BBC piece linked above wonders if this would allow others to rebroadcast the games minus any such add-ons, though you have to imagine that the Premier League will (if it isn't already) include something on screen at all times.
But what I get out of this ruling is that, in theory, it would now be perfectly legal to go to a match, and broadcast it yourself via your own camera. Or, hell, send a few friends with smartphones and streaming video -- and have someone running a board picking which camera to show at any one time, and you could create an entirely crowdsourced broadcast. Of course, stadium officials might throw you out, but it sounds like from this ruling, such a production would not violate copyright law, since there's no copyright in the sporting event itself.
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Filed Under: copyright, eu, sporting events
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Crowdcast Sport
How long before we have a crowdcasting app that you use to collect streams of live footage from tagged events and locations? A sort of video Gowalla.
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Re: Crowdcast Sport
Not long
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Re: Crowdcast Sport
Another paper
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Issue with the conclusion
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Re: Issue with the conclusion
With current technology that won't be a problem just capture the movement of the players and animated that with virtual players, you could have bunnies playing football in recreated stadium without any trademarks.
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Re: Issue with the conclusion
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Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
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Re: Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
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Re: Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
You can put any characters to play the game, and with graphics card doubling capacity every 18 months, photorealistic plays are not far off.
Not to mention the new abilities everyone will have like zooming in on a play, any angle view possible.
It can get exciting in the no so distant future, but something people can do right now is to track all the logos and stuff and strip any part of the image in realtime and substitute that for something else.
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Re: Issue with the conclusion
Also currently there's rules around displaying logos on the football pitch. I think there can't be anything on the playing area or within a certain distance around the outside. Wouldn't stop broadcasters adding something in their transmission, but it wouldn't appear on a fan-made live recording.
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Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
Also the inclusion of the copyrighted material would count as incidental and so be allowed under fair dealing/use.
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Re: Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
Levis, GWG, Fruit of the Loom, Jockey, Reebok, Timex...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
Maybe using a implementation of this library.
http://similarimages.sourceforge.net/
Or OpenCV
http://www.quora.com/How-does-Plink-Art-recognize-paintings
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http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=photorealistic+games
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Issue with the conclusion
BALLS!
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Re: Issue with the conclusion
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Re: Issue with the conclusion
Seeing as those things are not the real point of the coverage (no viewer would miss it if it wasn't there) a court should rule that the copyrighted items were simply "incidentally included" and therefore allowed under fair use/dealing..
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Re: Issue with the conclusion
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Competition
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Re: Competition
Face tracking and substitution in realtime is already kind of possible with open source tools.
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However your take sounds much nicer, and was an angle I hadn't thought of before. All this means tho is that the TV selling rules will alter at the next deal and we'll see every player branded with a sky logo in the middle of their foreheads.
I hope that the subscriptions will become cheaper and the players paid less. But then again I hope Btafink gets a live action movie. So y'know....
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"Of course, stadium officials might throw you out"
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Re: "Of course, stadium officials might throw you out"
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sorry but
OR perhaps all those footballers taking dives should be prosecuted?...nah never gonna happen
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1) They wouldn't let you bring the equipment required in. You could get your cellphone camera in, but most British football pitches won't let you bring in an obvious, large camera to get the job done,
2) The terms and conditions of the ticket may explicitly forbid such undertakings,
3) you would still have to deal with all the copyright material, logos, and such that would be in your final product without permission (such as the series logo that is always around midfield in camera view, used to brand different games from the same team).
4) The costs and unreliability of wireless data networks...
and so on.
You have to read the full judgement to understand that while they don't own the rights to the game, they own the rights to everything in it, which effectively becomes the same thing.
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Re:
1) They wouldn't let you bring the equipment required in. You could get your cellphone camera in, but most British football pitches won't let you bring in an obvious, large camera to get the job done,
Get your self a good vantage point outside the ground (Rushcliffe Council building next to Trent Bridge Cricket ground springs to mind).
2) The terms and conditions of the ticket may explicitly forbid such undertakings,
probably not enforceable after the event - although they could eject you - but in any case see above.
3) you would still have to deal with all the copyright material, logos, and such that would be in your final product without permission (such as the series logo that is always around midfield in camera view, used to brand different games from the same team).
This should be ruled to be incidental inclusion - since its omission would not affect the value of the coverage. Hence it would be allowed under fair use.
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Or make your own blimp that can rover above the stadium and capture the game in all its glory.
Wanna bet that futeboll fanatics will find a way to build dozens of those?
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Re:
2) Terms and conditions have limits.
3) That is not a problem, free open source camera tracking software already exist and digital blending is already implemented in a couple of free open source tools.
http://methodart.blogspot.com/2011/07/fast-image-cloning-library-ive-written.html (open source Seamless cloning implementation library)
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~danix/mvclone/ (cloning technique from Sisgraph 2009)
http://code.google.com/p/libmv/ (open source camera tracking)
4) Well there is always the chance people will upload those things later and people can make the composite after the fact.
5) I doubt anybody owns the movements of anybody else. But people can always substitute the infringing part on the fly.
http://vimeo.com/29348533 (face substitution in realtime, the same technique can be applied to other things that are easier to track)
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Re: Re:
Sporting events lose their "value" when they are no longer live.
The question isn't "can you", almost anything is technically possible. But there is nothing that can compete with the live event, and there are plenty of blocks in place that make this very hard to do.
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Also wouldn't be fun to see furry animals playing instead of humans with no ads in it?
Wouldn't you love to be the one making that pass or goal?
People can also find ways to include the movements recorded into football games they play.
I can think of a million reasons why people would want to record that stuff.
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If nothing can compete, what is the need of these blocks?
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There is one thing that can compete, which is the same event, live, from another source that hasn't paid for the rights so they can give it away for free.
Welcome to Techdirt land. You might want to read back a couple of years to understand the "power" of free to destroy business models and leave us with a diminished economy.
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Being there is live.
Sorry if media has confused this issue for you.
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Henry Ford, many years ago, figured out after declining sales, that if he employed more people, not only could he build cars cheaper, making available to more people, the employees would also have money to buy his cars, which again was more sales. This was the birth of the assembly line
You may want to look into how sending all jobs overseas leaves your people with little work, diminishing the economy.
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Isn't copyright just marvellous, you can exploit others and hold all the rights for yourself and if somebody use it you can sue them for millions LoL
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Welcome to the world of Free Market Capitalism.
I always knew the "entertainment industry" were communists. More then half of the people called before McCarthy in the 50's were Hollywood jews
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Ignore the smartphones bit.
Also, with that many cameras, you don't need to choose a view from each one. You can use all of them to produce a true 3D (not stereoscopic) representation of the event. The viewer could then choose any angle they liked.
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Re: Ignore the smartphones bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg3deiPAyH8
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Re: Ignore the smartphones bit.
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/software/pmvs/
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Hmmm....
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Re: Hmmm....
The good thing about wireless is that you can create your own mesh network and it won't cost you an arm and a leg.
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If the event can't be copyrighted...
Seems like they can take something that isn't copyrighted (by anyone if not by them) and make it copyrighted. It sounds like the court didn't think that through.
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Re: If the event can't be copyrighted...
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Re: If the event can't be copyrighted...
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Re: Re: If the event can't be copyrighted...
Copyright is just full of win.
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ecj on decoders
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