Court: Live webcasts of sports events on Internet don't violate copyrights

Live broadcasts of sports events on the Internet do not violate copyrights, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Michal Agmon-Gonen ruled yesterday. As a result, the live-footy.org web site will be allowed to continue free broadcasts of Premier League soccer games.

The Premier League grants licenses for broadcasting the games to broadcasters in 207 countries. The league's management, which recently discovered that the Israeli-owned web site has been broadcasting the games live, sent an email to the owners demanding that the broadcasts cease. When the owners refused, the Premier League asked for an injunction to put a halt to the streaming.

For the legal action to proceed, the league first had to identify the web site's operators. In deliberating over whether to require the site to identify its owner, Agmon-Gonen addressed the legality of live broadcasts over the Internet using streaming technology, which does not allow viewers to save the content on their computers.

The judge found that the Premier League failed to prove that the web site had violated its rights. Internet broadcasts are not similar to television broadcasts, she ruled, and the Internet broadcast viewers are not people who would potentially pay to see the games on television.

Agmon-Gonen said the web site owner had shown both that the site served an important social purpose, and that its activity is not among the core activities copyrights are meant to protect. This core, the judge said, includes prose, movies, music and artistic photography.

"The public's main interest is in information, not the angle of the photography," she wrote. "In the live broadcast of a sporting event, viewers are interested primarily in the real-time result - who did or did not make a goal for the game."

She therefore ruled that the identity of the web site owner should not be revealed. "The web site owner will remain anonymous, and should he wish, is free to continue to broadcast sports games to fans all over the world for free, in the same format," she wrote.

Attorney Yoram Lichtenstein, who represented the site's owner, called the ruling "a ground-breaking decision by a brave judge who is the first to stand up and defend the public's basic rights, rather than those of corporations."

The Premier League's attorney, Meir Klinger, said that based on his initial review, he believes the decision to be incorrect and will probably appeal it to the Supreme Court.