Background Report on Digital Piracy of Sporting Events

2.2Takedown notification programs

However, the onus for such activity is placed entirely on the rights holder: protecting their content in this manner necessitates resource-intensive efforts to locate streams, record evidence, and send a notification to the site, service, or host (or all three) requesting the removal of the offending content. It should be emphasised that take down notification programs require voluntary compliance by the pirate services. Since the value proposition is in the pirated content, compliance is highly dependent on the intellectual property arbitrage between the rules and enforcement regimes of relevant countries.

With popular cricket and football matches featured on more than fifty individual streams – and with stream providers unable to be contacted until the event has begun – the process also requires a significant amount of work to be compressed into a small windows of opportunity. If those who receive notifications do not comply at all or in a timely fashion (and for a football or basketball game, for instance, that means a couple of hours) then viewers of the unauthorised live stream will be able to consume the entire event without interruption. Further, compliance is often hampered by the lack of legal obligation in most countries for the site providing the stream or link to remove the unauthorised content or the link to that content, though many linking sites comply out of fear of legal action.

Reactive stream takedown takes up time, resource, and significant expense, focused on a small window of opportunity and based on the compliance of sites and services who gain much popularity from distributing the streams as widely as possible. It is far from an ideal way to protect content. Yet at present, the takedown process is currently the most effective way and in some countries, the only way for rights holders to try and ensure that their live events are not consumed by an illegitimate audience.

There are improvements which can be made to the process: for instance, those services such as SopCast (originating in China) which facilitate a large amount of the sporting content found online could provide a way for recognised rights holders to automatically take down streams which feature their own events. This would significantly improve the speed with which streams could be removed and lower the cost involved with the takedown process. It would also help alter the balance of power in the current situation which now lies squarely with those providing and viewing the streams. However, this still places the responsibility and burden on the sporting league for the location and removal of the unauthorised streams.

After substantial direct and indirect pressure, MLB Advanced Media managed to persuade the SopCast P2P streaming service to place a ban on the live streaming of Major League Baseball games (see Section 7 for further detail). The reaction of SopCast also demonstrates that these services do retain a significant level of control over the content which they distribute. Because the SopCast developers – and those of other streaming services – own and manage a number of central points within the upload and distribution process, they are able to impose control at any of these points and can remove channels and streams, ban users, and proactively and reactively patrol their network for infringing content.