Premier League: Don’t Post Unofficial Goal Videos

The Pemier League is cracking down on unofficial, fan-posted goal videos ahead of its season opening Saturday, according to the BBC.

The concern apparently arises from a huge number of videos posted to Vine during this summer’s World Cup. Vine is a social media network centered on short, six-second video clips.

But as the English Premier League wants to remind fans, posting videos of goals, whether on Vine or other networks like Facebook or Twitter, breaks copyright laws.

“You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” Premier League communications director Dan Johnson told BBC’s Newsbeat.

Social shares are usually considered a valuable piece of “viral” marketing for organizations, a way for consumers to spread things they particularly like (say, a video of a stellar goal) with their friends and followers while, at the same time, gaining attention for the product. For example, The Guardian points to the 539,000 who follow the @FootballVines Twitter page as an example of this phenomenon at work in the soccer world.

But the Premier League’s Johnson said that posting those videos is “a breach or 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.”

Fan reaction to the crackdown isn’t lost on Johnson, who says, “I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”

The Premier League has a big interest in doing so, after a £3 billion deal (that’s just a bit under $5 billion) gave the broadcast rights to Sky Sport and BT Sport, according to The Guardian. The newspaper also reports that two of its competitors, The Sun and The Times, “also bought the online rights and are keen not to have people able to see goal clips for free elsewhere.”

“It’s important to underline that it’s illegal to do this, we’ve obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it, we’ve got legal teams talking with them about what we can do,” The Sun‘s Dan Scoggins told the BBC.

Slate‘s Tyler Lopez points to an American comparison:

“In the United States, Major League Baseball is notorious for its fierce protection of its copyrights. Rules regarding photography and videography vary widely from park to park, but almost all of them are very clear about distributing said content. While stadium selfies probably won’t be targeted, they’re still (technically) fair game if MLB believes they’re infringing on their copyright”

Fans won’t know until after Saturday’s games just how serious the Premier League is about policing unofficial video postings, but given recent history it’s almost certain there will be plenty of opportunity to do so.

[photo: ChristianPost.com]