A London High Court ruling could help sports broadcasters tighten the screws on mobile apps that enable users to share unauthorised video footage from TV broadcasts.
The news follows a copyright infringement case brought to courts in March, which saw sports broadcaster Sky, alongside the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), successful in a case against Fanatix – the company behind a mobile app which promotes the online sharing of short video clips from sports broadcasts.
The app allows users to capture up to eight seconds of footage to share online with their friends.
But the ECB and Sky successfully argued that the operators of the Fanatix app were responsible for infringing copyright and now, the app contains restrictions on use and requires all users to attribute the source of shared clips and images.
Under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, communicating copyrighted content to the public is an act generally restricted by copyright. The Act states that copyrighted material is, in effect, communicated to the public “unlawfully” if a broadcast (or excerpt from a broadcast) is made available to the public without permission from its rights’ holders.
This includes footage accessed via an “electronic transmission” in broadcasts accessible by the public “from a place and at a time individually chosen by them” – i.e. using a smartphone or tablet.
However, some very minor infringements of copyright can go unpunished under UK copyright laws, as copyright can only be infringed if the unauthorised use involves either the whole or a “substantial part” of the protected broadcast.
Mr Justice Arnold, said: “In the context of broadcasts and first fixations of films, both the quality and quantity of the copied content must be assessed when determining whether it constitutes a ‘substantial part’ of the copyrighted material”.