Premier League “killjoys” vow to clamp down on vines

Ahead of the new season starting on Saturday the Premier League has warned football fans not to post unofficial vines online.

During the World Cup short videos - or vines - of goals popped up online almost as soon as they were scored. Great saves, brutal tackles and other controversial incidents were being shared on social media within minutes of taking place on the pitch.

The Premier League are determined not to allow the same thing happen during their season and warned fans that such posts are in breach of copyright law.

The Premier League’s director of communications Dan Johnson spoke to the BBC about their policy.

“You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” said Johnson. “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.”

“I know it sounds as if we're killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”

The Times and The Sun have both agreed deals with the Premier League to show goals and highlights on their websites. The Sun’s aim is to have every Premier League goal available to view on their site within two minutes of being scored, available at a subscription cost of £7 per month. Clearly that content has no value if goals and other key moments are already freely available online.

Dean Scoggins, deputy head of sport at the Sun, said the paper is working closely with the Premier League.

He said: “Posting poor-quality videos to social networks is illegal.”

“It is breaking copyright laws and although the clips cannot compete with the quality of service that we are providing, we are not happy that it takes place.”

Hundreds of thousands of users follow some football Vine accounts on Twitter.

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 long-running copyright battles over pubs that use cheaper foreign decoders to screen matches and free online streaming sites.

Mr Rendle said: “I think the problem from this (Vine clips) is anyone who has got a Sky subscription, a phone and a Twitter account could potentially be doing this. That’s the real threat.”

“The contrary to that is if you can get a relationship with Twitter and Vine to help stamp this out.”

Twitter declined to comment but pointed to Vine rules which state that users “may not post content that violates the rights of a third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy, and publicity rights”.

The most recent figures show that Twitter received a total of 9,199 copyright “takedown” notices in the first six months of this year – a 38% increase compared with the second half of 2013. Material was removed in 76% of the cases.

A spokesman for one of the most popular football Vine accounts on Twitter said: “The threat of legal action on the uploaders of these Vines we believe to be a scare tactic as the reality of policing this is incredibly difficult.

“The only contact we have had regarding these videos is from press outlets.”

“We have had no legal contact of any sort regarding any of our communication. In the event this should happen, we will of course adhere to any instruction or guidance given to us by the relevant authorities.”

“At no point whatsoever do we, as a team, upload the Vines ourselves.”

“They are sourced from others across the globe who are regularly uploading content to their Vine account. We are merely posting what we can find on the internet that we believe our audience will like. We do this for our love of the beautiful game, not profit.”

Online users were unimpressed by the warning.

Great to see the @premierleague tackling real issues such as vines of goals. Nothing more important in football.

— shivam manghnani (@shivamLM) August 15, 2014

Greedy fuckers. I don't even like the game but this makes me want to do a few football vines myself http://t.co/3QTD9qRqva

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) August 15, 2014

Looking forward to even more people posting vines, showing the Premier League how ridiculous this action is.

— 1886 Arsenal (@1886Artekkers) August 15, 2014

“@BBCNews: Premier League warns fans about Vines http://t.co/vsSKxiLh9Q” yeah good luck getting that genie back in the bottle

— Barney (@BaBaBaBarney) August 15, 2014

The Premier League is clamping down on Goal Vines this year which I'm in favour of because it's hard enough to score without adding foliage

— Baz (@bazlyons) August 15, 2014

Hat tip: The Independent