Europe to the rescue at The Red, White and Blue

It's not very often that the words 'Europe', 'Greek', 'law' and 'Portsmouth' ever combine to make a good news story but here's an attempt, culled from today's headlines. 

The European Court in Luxembourg, the highest judicial authority in the European Union, today “opened the way for sports fans to watch live matches through foreign TV services, throwing into doubt the value of highly sought-after and lucrative broadcast rights,” according Reuters.

The court ruled in favour of Karen Murphy, the doughty landlady of Portsmouth’s The Red, White and Blue in her appeal over being prosecuted for using a Greek satellite decoder to show live matches on Saturday afternoons. Her argument was based on the European freedom to provide services throughout the EU. The court agreed that the sale of rights on a country-by-country basis breached EU law.

The potential ramifications of this decision could be far-reaching indeed. According to Vanessa Barnett, a partner from Sports & Media Group at Charles Russell and specialising in the digital media sector: “this case is the first chink into the armour of territory based licensing across the board.  Any digital media creator or licensor - music, film, TV, games, etc - should take a cold, hard look at their rights structures as filtering by geolocation technologies is today very much under threat."

And that doesn’t sound too implausible if Europe’s commissioner for the digital agenda Neelie Kroes' comments are to be taken at face value:  “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?”


But there are clues that the case might not be quite so groundbreaking as intitially suspected. Quoted in the Irish Examiner, Tony Ballard, partner at law firm Harbottle & Lewis, suggested that the judgment's victory might yet prove Pyrrhic. 

He explained: “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.”

That more measured response is echoed in the bigger picture by Simon Johnson, a consultant specialising in sport and broadcasting rights at the aformentioned Sports & Media Group of Charles Russell: "The impact of this judgment is that sports rights holders will now require a slightly different approach to exploitation of rights throughout Europe - but the business model of exploiting sports rights through licensing remains firm.” 

Any confusion is apparently likely to be shortlived and Johnson predicts that “there may be more pan European deals and no doubt a considerable amount of creative and legal energy will be applied to ensuring that broadcasting rights for sport remain a valuable asset within the UK economy."


This 'asset within the UK economy' is one which is extracting huge amounts of money from struggling businesses and is manifestly prepared to fight to maintain an artificial market advantage that has clearly been found to be in breach European competition law. 


Let's just hope getting back to business as usual is not as easy Mr Johnson makes it sound.