Kroes vows to sort out pay-per-view soccer confusion

Europe’s commissioner for the digital agenda Neelie Kroes today vowed to sort out confusion surrounding cross-border access to film, music and pay-per-view football games.

In a speech prepared before the verdict backing British pub landlady Karen Murphy, she told a think-tank audience that “invisible barriers” remained in the distance-selling of “digital goods”.

She went on: “If I can buy a music CD online from a company in the Netherlands and have it posted to me here in Belgium, why can’t I buy a digital download from the same company?

“If I can watch my local team’s football matches using online pay-per-view in one member state, why not in 27?

“This situation does not make much sense to the man on the street. To be honest, it is not a situation that makes much sense to me. And we need to fix it.”

Specialist lawyers were trying to make sense of the implications of today’s verdict, which clearly declared that the Premier League could not claim copyright over the content of a live match in a package offered to official customers buying into their exclusive coverage.

But they did have author’s rights over their own part of any screen package - the Premier League anthem and so on.

The immediate response to the result – after final confirmation from the UK High Court which sought EU clarification – is likely to be an increased rush to buy cheap Greek decoders to screen matches meant for the League’s exclusive broadcasters, Sky and ESPN.

But the verdict has implications not just for live screened football but for film and music rights too.

On the face of it, using cheap decoders to bypass official suppliers of broadcast movies and music would still be a breach of EU rules, because the entire content is created, copyrighted material.

That would mean no change, but intellectual property lawyer Toby Headdon of the London-based commercial law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner said industry insiders were still studying the balance between EU copyright rules and EU single market rules which guarantees freedom to provide services across EU borders.

He said: “This is a clear statement from Europe that intellectual property rights cannot be relied upon to fragment the market and charge different prices in different EU countries for the same content.

“The decision looks set to change the licensing landscape in Europe, not just for football broadcasts but potentially for other content such as films and music.

“The Premier League and BSkyB will have to go back to the drawing board. BSkyB pays in excess of £1bn to broadcast lucrative sporting events such as Premier League matches and it is likely to face a significant challenge in recouping that cost from subscribers who can now take advantage of cheaper subscriptions to broadcasts available elsewhere in Europe.

“One possible outcome is that the Premier League will confine its licences to the most profitable countries but it is probably more likely that the different pricing structures currently in place in different countries will meet somewhere in the middle.”

Tony Ballard, partner at law firm Harbottle & Lewis, said the judgment had a “sting in the tail”.

He went on: “The Court held that the showing of a broadcast in a pub without consent is itself an infringement of copyright. Rights holders may therefore yet see off the pubs and the biter may yet be bit.

“This is because the pub is perfectly free to get itself a decoder card from a Greek broadcaster, which the Court has ruled is a single market issue, but if they use the card in the pub then that is a copyright issue. In other words, the landlady can’t use the card to show Premier League football to customers, but only for her private use.”