Is it only football that's commercial?

By Mark Daniels

- Last updated on GMT

Related tags Premier league Sky sports

Mark Daniels, licensee at the Tharp Arms in Chippenham, Cambridgeshire
Mark Daniels, licensee at the Tharp Arms in Chippenham, Cambridgeshire
I have been pondering a question for a little while … it is one that will either make me appear incredibly thick (some would enjoy that) or will...

I have been pondering a question for a little while … it is one that will either make me appear incredibly thick (some would enjoy that) or will point out a hole in a legislation somewhere.

We read today of yet another licensee who has been successfully prosecuted by the Premier League for breaching copyright and broadcasting a football game using an Albanian broadcaster rather than Sky.

Linda Fox has been hit with a £6,000 penalty for bowing to the pressures of her customers to use a system she had installed illegally and had stopped using after a warning from Media Protection Services. I understand that pressure, as most of us do - customers don't care about the legalities of what we do and don't agree to in this trade, they just want to drink what they want and watch a game of football, and if you can do that without paying the fortune Sky charge then so be it. "Take the risk, how likely are you to get caught? We'll go elsewhere if you don't..."

When I removed Sky from my bar last August my customers suggested that I utilise the domestic Sky I have upstairs in the flat to still show them games. The pressure was immense, and one or two offered to give me websites where I could stream illegal feeds to my televisions with the aid of a laptop.

So, first, let me make one thing clear: I refuse to put Sky Sports on my domestic account for fear of somebody at Sky thinking I might be broadcasting it illegally, when I won't; and second, of all the things I've never understood on the Internet, it's how to stream video content that I shouldn't. Whenever I have tried, all I've ended up with is pornography and viruses, so I gave up.

Whenever I read of these prosecutions, however, one thing always seems to stand out: it is the Premier League who prosecute licensees for breaches of copyright, not Sky. So here is my question: does this mean that only the Premier League matches are subject to commercial broadcast? In other words, are other sports shown on Sky Sports immune to such terms?

I just wonder, because you never hear of somebody being prosecuted for showing golf, or Indycar … and next year will the FIA really go out of their way to prosecute a pub showing Formula 1?

Riots...

I've spent the past two days ill in bed and have pretty much had nothing but the television and YouTube for company; like everybody else, I have found myself completely dumbfounded by the scenes I have been watching on telly. We are used to turning on one of the billion news channels we have access to these days and seeing pictures of war-torn streets and ravaged communities, but did we ever think we'd see it in London, or Manchester, or Bristol?

I kept waiting for somebody to blame alcohol for all these louts who have helped themselves to new flatscreen televisions and bits of carpet but, thankfully, so far nobody has - and pubs have actually come to the fore in the news for doing their bit to try and help their local areas.

But I can't help thinking that if the government had spent more time paying attention to this country in recent years, rather than simply hitting us with more and more punitive taxes in order to fund their "interests" in other territories, we might not have found ourselves in such a mess...

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