FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil is behind us. If you like football (or as people in U.S. call it, soccer) this competition was a real treat for you. I’m in that very same boat, I simply love that sport and have immensely enjoyed watching the competition. From Keylor Navas’ amazing saves and Suarez’s crazy appetite to Germany’s brilliant display’s and Brazil’s ultimate semi-final humiliation. All of that is a part of this game and that is why people love it so much, no wonder they call it the most important of all unimportant things in the world.
Social networks are a source of all sorts of content, football goals and moments being one of them. FIFA tried to keep such content from recently finished World Cup away from the social networks, copyright an all, and it seems that very same thing is about to happen to Premier League in England. BBC Newsbeat held an interview with the Premier League’s director of Communications, Dan Johnson, in which Mr. Johnson warned fans that it is illegal to share goals online. He stated the following: “It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we’re developing technologies like GIF crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity.”, these crawlers will probably do their best to track illegal content on Vine and block it. “I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”, he also added. English publications “The Sun” and “The Times” have lucrative contracts with the Premier League, therefore have rights on all the goals scored in the Premier League.
It is completely normal these publications want to protect their property, the only question is can they do it? Premier League is a big organisation, but compared to FIFA and UEFA they’re rather small. It’s going to be interested to see if they’ll manage to control what people on social networks, if their plan pans out we’ll see far more such content on Vine and Twitter in the near future.