By Andrew Warshaw
February 3 – A surburban English publican has won a crucial stage in her claim to screen unauthorised live Premiership football in a landmark case described as potentially the Bosman of broadcasting.
Karen Murphy, who runs a pub in Portsmouth in the south-east of England, is confident her partial victory will set an historic precedent, with pubs and clubs throughout the UK able to defy a Premier League ban by screening matches that are not officially televised without fear of prosecution.
Murphy has paid nearly £8,000 ($13,000) in fines for showing Premier League matches via a Greek satellite decoder and breaking copyright law in the process.
She appealed to the European Court of Justice and a non-binding opinion from advocate general Juliane Kolkott has backed her case.
She said restricting the sale and viewing of sports rights to one country is “contrary to European Union law”.
Sky and ESPN have the exclusive broadcast rights to Premier League football in the UK but for years pubs in cities across Britain have been using imported satellite decoder cards to screen top-flight games, unwilling to pay the increasingly unaffordable monthly subscription fees.
If the legal opinion becomes an official ruling, it will have massive repercussions, paving the way for pubs to ignore Saturday afternoon restrictions and allow landlords to legally show games prohibited to Sky subscribers, using cheaper foreign satellite services.
As a result, the future value of the Premier League’s broadcasting rights are bound to be seriously undermined – with top-flight clubs taking a massive hit in revenue.
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