Premier League Uses Copyright To Pull Down YouTube Video Of Professor Advocating For Stronger Copyright For Premier League

from the circular-reasoning dept

Via Bas Grasmayer we learn that the English Premier League and its insane take on copyrights has struck again. We've written many times before about the Premier League and its wacky belief that every possible use of its content must be licensed. Just a few weeks ago, it said that it would start taking down animated gifs and 6-second Vine videos of goals, even though it knew this would piss off fans. Still, the Premier League said it had to do this because "copyright."

The Institute for Information Law (IViR) recently held its Information Influx event, and it included a panel discussion on "Who Owns the World Cup?" discussing the very question of copyright and sports clips. IViR put video of all the sessions online, but if you go visit the "Who Owns the World Cup" video, you'll see this instead: Yes, that's right, the entire video of a discussion on the copyright issues around sharing tiny clips of football/soccer videos was taken down by the Premier League, because one of the panelists showed a brief clip to raise some of the questions concerning copyright issues.

Amazingly, it appears that the only clips of Premier League matches were shown in a presentation by Prof. Lionel Bently who was arguing in favor of stronger copyright protection for sporting events. As Thomas Margoni from IViR explains in his post about this, this seems like an "own goal" for the Premier League, abusing copyright law to censor a legal discussion in which the "offender" is advocating on their own behalf:

It is not unlikely that the FA Premier League requested the removal on a semi-automatic basis without really watching the video (a sort of good faith mistake) and hopefully YouTube will reinstate the video soon. In spite of the abovementioned brilliant intervention by a leading IP scholar arguing in favor of more (copyright) protection for sporting events, I am inclined to say that right now, looking at the disconsolate face that appears instead of the video on the blocked YouTube webpage, sports organizers have enough rights as it is.

Not so much a penalty as an own goal.

But, you know, gotta take it down, because "copyright."

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, lionel bently, own goal, soccer, sporting events, takedowns, youtube
Companies: ivir, premier league