Copyright and live streaming of sports broadcasting

ABSTRACT

The inception of live streaming technology has rapidly changed the way in which sporting events are transmitted. The unauthorised retransmission of live sports telecasts over the Internet has become one of the main concerns in sports media, where broadcasters have lost billions of dollars’ worth of sports broadcasting contracts and sponsorship deals. The scale of this problem has caused serious harm, both to sports rights-holders and to broadcasters. Legislative reforms are required in order to balance the public’s ever-increasing desire for convenient ways to view digital materials against the legal rights of the owners of the material, while also aiming to maintain a forward-looking perspective in an attempt to foresee potential technological advancements that may pose considerable challenges to the traditional copyright law. This article analyses how the concept of live streaming of live sports has changed the legal landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Copyright
• live streaming
• sports broadcasting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Matthew Tsai http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4338-5775

Notes

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59. There are three relevant definitions in section 10 of the Act: “Broadcast” is defined as “a communication to the public delivered by a broadcasting service within the meaning of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (Cth).” “Television broadcast” means “visual images broadcast by way of television, together with any sounds broadcast for reception along with those images”, “Sound broadcast” means “a broadcast otherwise than as part of a television broadcast”, see Copyright Subsistence: Subject Matter Other than Works (Part IV) at <http://wikijuris.net/ausip/copyrightsubsp4>(last accessed 16 November 2016).

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