Soccer bosses blow time on goal clips

Premier League bosses are launching a crackdown on unofficial clips of action posted on social media.

The Premier League said using Vines and gifs to capture goals and other moments is a breach of copyright.

During the World Cup, thousands of short videos were posted on sites such as Twitter within minutes of the ball hitting the back of the net.

Now English football’s top flight is urging fans not to share the content. Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, told BBC Newsbeat: “You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law.

“It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it. We’re developing technologies like Gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter, to look to curtail this kind of activity.”

Vine, which is run by Twitter, allows users to capture and share videos that are a few seconds long.

Adam Rendle, a copyright law specialist at Taylor Wessing, said any action taken against those in breach would probably depend on the scale of the infringement.

He said: “If it is just you or I on a Saturday afternoon doing it every now and again, I think the tactic there would be to inform Twitter or Vine and get it taken down on an isolated basis.

“If there are serial ‘Viners’ who are setting up accounts to repeatedly do this every time there is a high-profile match and they have got thousands of followers so it’s becoming an unofficial service of goals, they might seek to get the account blocked.

“And if it is starting to get really serious, they might take an offline approach and start issuing proceedings.”

The Premier League has faced copyright battles over pubs that use cheaper foreign decoders to screen matches and free online streaming sites.