Premier League slams streaming websites with court order to stop showing matches

The Premier League has obtained High Court orders to block streaming site FirstRow Sports from providing web access to live streams of football matches for free.

A judge sitting in London ruled today the injunction, which will also impact on other sports, was justified as the operators of the 'very popular' website were making millions of pounds from copyright infringement.

The application for an injunction came from the Football Association Premier League Ltd (FAPL), which owns the copyright in broadcast recordings of all Premier League matches.

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Following the FAPL application, the judge said FirstRow was 'profiting from infringement on a large scale' by making match broadcasts available 'to persons who are not entitled to view them either because they have not subscribed to the broadcaster’s service, or because the broadcaster has only been licensed by FAPL for a different territory'.

The injunction is against the UK’s six main retail internet service providers (ISPs) - British Sky Broadcasting, BT, Everything Eveywhere, TalkTalk, Telefonica UK and Virgin Media.

Chancery Division judge Mr Justice Arnold said his orders require the ISPs to take measures “to block or at least impede” access by their customers to the FirstRow website.

In action: The Premier League say FirstRow Sports are profiting from copyright theft

The judge said the ISPs did not oppose the making of the orders and had agreed to their terms. But the court still had to decide whether the orders were justified.

The FirstRow ban has been obtained before the start of the next Premier League season, which kicks off on Saturday August 17.

The judge said the FAPL application was supported by eight other organisations including rightholders for golf, darts, snooker and rugby, as well as other football bodies.

All had provided witness statements confirming that FirstRow was not licensed by them to exploit their copyright in matches.

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FirstRow was a website operating for some time through a number of domain names, some of which had been seized by the US department of homeland security, said the judge.

The streams indexed on FirstRow were provided by third-party streamers using one of a number of user-generated websites (UGCs).

In April this year, FirstRow received 9.98 million unique user hits worldwide and had made considerable sums in advertising and affiliation revenues, said the judge.

FAPL’s expert witness Dr David Price estimated it was likely to be generating between £5 million and £9 million in annual revenue, with many of the UGC streamers also motivated by financial reward as they were able to add their own adverts to the streams.

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It was not used merely to watch coverage of sporting events in users’ homes but also by some public houses in the UK, said the judge.

FAPL had been unable to establish who were FirstRow’s operators and where they could be contacted. It had been registered under many different domain names “using a mixture of what appear to be false name and address details and registrations via proxy registration firms”.

Current host of the site was Portlane in Sweden, described by one FAPL witness as 'a well-known haven for pirate sites'.