EU TV ruling backs soccer fans over Premier League

[October 04, 2011]  BRUSSELS (AP) -- The European Union's highest court ruled Tuesday that soccer fans should be free to use the cheapest satellite decoder available to watch games, even if that sidesteps exclusive national broadcasting agreements.

The decision could have a huge impact on how the rights of England's Premier League -- the world's richest soccer league -- are sold in the rest of Europe.

The European Court of Justice said the current system in which broadcasters set up exclusive contracts for each EU nation and seek to prohibit viewers from watching games with a cheap decoder card in another nation "is contrary to EU law" -- a decision that goes against England's lucrative Premier League.

The Luxembourg-based court said it "holds that national legislation which prohibits the import, sale or use of foreign decoder cards is contrary to the freedom to provide services and cannot be justified."

The ruling upheld a key element of the court's earlier legal advice, which the Premier League had said would damage the interests of broadcasters and viewers of its games across the 27-nation EU.

Since Premier League games have been sold based on national exclusivity -- where one broadcaster gets the rights for an entire nation -- the games being sent to different EU nations needed to be transmitted with encryption that needed a special decoder to become visible.

Some pubs in Britain, where it costs plenty to get rights to view Premier League games, started to buy cheaper Greek satellite decoder cards and transmitted those games for fans in Britain, which set off the legal challenge.

For years, the EU has been working to turn the territory of its member states into on open market unburdened by the commercial barriers that hurt continentwide trade in the past.

The court said the practice of selling rights on a country-by-country basis and keeping cheaper alternatives out of other member states as a blatant infringement on that principle.

"A system of exclusive licenses is also contrary to European Union competition law if the license agreements prohibit the supply of decoder cards to television viewers who wish to watch the broadcasts outside the Member State for which the license is granted," the court's statement said.

The Premier League is by far the richest soccer league in the world. The latest three-year domestic broadcasting-rights deal alone raised 1.782 billion pounds ($2.87 billion).

The court ruled that the Premier League cannot claim copyright of the matches themselves, since they "cannot be considered to be an author's intellectual creation." It said the Premier League could only do so over its anthem, video sequences and prerecorded films.

[Associated Press; By RAF CASERT]

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