Stories
Last summer, the Football Association Premier League Limited assembled a team of corporate lawyers and headed for the High Court in Dublin.
Their purpose? Putting a stop to illegal streaming of Premier League matches in Ireland. The defendants — who did not oppose the case — were the Irish internet service providers (ISPs): Eir, Sky, Virgin, and Vodafone.
One year later, the four providers have again been named as defendants in another case over illegal streaming in the Irish courts. Only this time the plaintiff is not the FA, but Uefa, the governing body of European football.
Uefa has retained Acautus, a boutique intellectual property law firm and European trademark agency based in Dublin, to handle the case. Documents were lodged with the court in recent days initiating the case and setting out the cause of action.
Uefa is seeking a court order which would enable them to force ISPs to block illegal streams. The governing body has secured such an order in other countries, usually with the content of the ISPs.
Uefa’s main club competitions are the Champions League and the Europa League. Alistair Payne, a lawyer with Acuatus has filed an affidavit in relation to the case, as has Seong Sin Han, chief counsel, commercial & technology legal services at Uefa. A number of expert witnesses have also filed documents.
Illegal streaming is big business, and a number of rights holders have sought to curb the practice. For example, when it sought its court order last year, Mark Plumb of the Premier League presented a poll showing 38 per cent of the Irish population admitted to having watched them. A majority said they didn’t consider the streams illegal.
The Premier League got serious about stopping piracy when, starting in 2015, viewership of Premier League matches started to drop significantly for the first time. In 2015/16 it fell by 18 per cent; the following season by 14 per cent.
The drop was unprecedented. In the 25-year history of the League, the numbers had reliably gone up every year. Viewership, TV rights and sponsorship regularly set new records. For the Premier League, the drop in viewers was a problem. For many Premier League clubs, whose economic model is based on ever-rising TV revenue, it was a potential crisis.
Uefa has been having similar problems and has also initiated a string of legal actions.
How do the illegal streams work?
In his 2019 High Court affidavit, the Premier League’s Mark Plumb describes the mechanics:
“The streaming of live broadcast sports content essentially involves the extraction, by a person who receives a legitimate broadcast signal, of the live content delivered via that signal from a setup box, and the uploading and retransmission of that content over the internet in real-time.
“Typically users will locate streams either by clicking on a link which has been posted on a website or social media platform or which surfaced via a search engine result… One source stream can, therefore, end up providing access to content via hundreds of different links and a number of different platforms.”
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