The UK's Premier League Slided Tackle Football Life in Motion GIFs and Vines
Following the World Cup 2014 in Brazil, and the massive spread of animated GIFs, Vines, and “GIF-goal” on the Internet, mostly over Twitter and Vine (the short-form video sharing service acquired by Twitter in October 2012) but also on Facebook, the most-watched football league in the world is trying to protect their intellectual property rights. According to Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, GIF are a breach of copyright law. But is it, really?
Graphics
Interchange Format, mostly commonly known as the acronym “GIF”, has not only been
the subject of disagreement over its pronunciation, even called
the “The Most Absurd Religious War in Geek History” (for the record, it should
be pronounced so it starts with a "j" rather than with a hard
"g"; although President Obama preferred to use the "hard g"), but due to its widespread usage on
the Internet recently caught the attention of the UK's Premier League
communication director (the legal division was perhaps still on holidays).
Simply put, GIFs are image files, sometimes animated, that are compressed to
reduce transfer time (introduced by CompuServe in 1987).
What’s the
big deal of a “GIF-goal” on Twitter or Vine? Good question. One may argue that,
if you really like football, a “GIF-goal”, lasting just a few seconds, is not
going to replace the experience of watching a football match. Besides the fact
that you eventually will have to wait for an update of the game on your phone,
the quality of the GIF is often very poor, and you will have to be lucky that
the “GIF-maker” will get the right angle at the right time (only a neutral
observer can do that; if you really like football, no way that you not gonna
jump around, scream, and shout. Therefore, no time for a GIF! There is also a
high chance that a person may want to watch the highlights of the match, at a
later stage, in a good quality, on Youtube for instance. But, as always with
football, a lot of money, broadcasting rights and contracts are involved. For
instance, The Sun has an app (“Sun Goals”) which shows, among others, Premier
League goals and video highlights within two minutes of the moment. but (after
your month trial) fans have to pay $11.68 per month (£7 a month) to access it.
Therefore, GIF and Vine, the mobile service that lets you capture and share
short (6 seconds or less) looping videos, are seen as a potential lack of
profits.
Is it not
going too far? As it was reported by TorrentFreak, “taking down GIFs will be a huge
resource drain and will do little to stop availability of content. The files
are too tiny, far too easily shared and come from potentially thousands of
directions. Add to this the problem of having to nuke content in near
real-time, and this becomes an unsolvable problem, at least by enforcement
means”. Moreover, there are already a good number of alternatives to GIFs which
renders the taking down process harder and, as it is the case with BitTorrent
sites, a fight lost in advance.
In the U.S.,
in SOFA Entertainment, Inc. v. Dodger
Productions, Inc., 2013 WL 1004610, (9th Cir. 2013), Dodger Productions
used a seven-second clip, owned by SOFA, of Ed Sullivan’s introduction of the
Four Seasons on The Ed Sullivan Show in its musical Jersey Boys. In
this case, the Court ruled that the defendant’s use of a clip from plaintiff’s
work was fair use, particularly because it not only did not harm the
plaintiff’s copyright but also because “society’s enjoyment of Dodger’s
creative endeavor [was] enhanced with its inclusion”[1]. One may easily argue that
the tiny part of the game used in the GIF and/or in the Vine 6 seconds or less
videos do not harm UK's Premier League’s copyright but simply promote the
enthusiasm, excitement and passion for the league. Under UK Law, where the
notion of fair dealing is more commonly used, and defined as term used to
describe some limited activities that are allowed without infringing copyright,
using material for the purpose of reporting current events is permitted
provided that: The amount of the material quoted (captured in this case) is limited
to reporting the important news in a football game, namely the goals.
In other
words, Mr. Johnson, this ongoing battle against GIFs, if not without any legal
basis, is another game of whack-a-mole. Raising the so-called breach of
copyright law on the day before the opening of the new 2014-2015 season was
most likely not the best way to reduce GIFs on the Internet over the weekend.
Comments
Post a Comment