Has The Final Whistle Blown for Sky?

I wasn’t able to follow up on that joy straight away, however, and by the time I came out of my meeting my e-mail, Facebook and Twitter feeds were flooded with people trying to let me know about the ruling, and customers asking if we could get this weekend’s game shown in the pub.

Sadly, though, much as I’m pleased for the ruling in Mrs Murphy’s favour and the implications it has for those of us small pubs who simply cannot afford Sky but want to have the flexibility to show the occasional game to punters who are interested, like any ruling judgement seemingly made on this industry there is enough vagueness within it to leave us wondering if we truly are safe to dust off the foreign decoders and rewrite the A-boards for the weekend.

It would appear that, reading between the lines, the judgement allows us to purchase foreign decoding systems, but still not to broadcast the events on them lest they breach copyright laws for logos, music played and so on.

Furthermore, it deems that it is illegal to restrict the sale of such equipment between territories, which lead to David Elstein, former head of programming for BSKYB, being rather bullish on Radio 4’s PM program on Tuesday night: “it is going to make a lot of money for BSKYB,” he commented.

Referring to the judgement as a Pyrrhic victory for Mrs Murphy, Elstein believes that it will lead to potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of new customers for Sky as it allows them to approach expats in countries such as Spain, the Canary Islands and so on.

Interestingly, he also referred to pubs and bars in those territories too, which surely contradicts the ruling that, whilst it’s possible to own a Greek decoder, it’s not possible to show their broadcast. After all, we can’t be allowing Sky to broadcast in their territories if the arrangement isn’t reciprocated. Can we?

Another interesting point is that the Premier League’s reaction could be to prevent foreign broadcasters from showing the 3pm Saturday games, a huge selling point to pubs for such companies alongside their lower fees.

A true pedant might argue that the one remaining point in this argument is that surrounding the copyright issues concerning Premier League logos and the brouhaha before the games. Perhaps it’s legal to turn the telly on five seconds after the game has started and switch it off again as the final whistle blows…?

Whatever your view on this, it’s a huge leap forward and Karen Murphy must have woken this morning feeling like a significant weight has been lifted. It appears there is still some way to go before we get a definitive judgement on this, but perhaps when it gets to the High Court we’ll finally be told that we can, indeed, buy and broadcast a service from a Greek company.

After all, we need Greece to earn as much money as they can in order to repay us their debts…