Premier League Targets Illegal Website
The Premier League is looking to close down a website that illegally streams live television to personal computers and shows English top-flight football games each week.
MyP2P.eu also screens Carling Cup action and it showed the England cricket team’s one-day international matches with Australia, along with hundreds of other sporting events, including American football games, rugby and F1.
The site uses ‘peer-to-peer’ technology, effectively acting as a conduit for users who want to share content over the internet.
The success of MyP2P.eu, which is registered in the Netherlands, illustrates the problems that sports bodies face as they struggle to protect lucrative deals with broadcasters at a time when broadband access is making it easier to watch television programmes illegally.
The Premier League has a policy of not showing any live matches at 3pm on a Saturday, but that rule does not apply to foreign broadcasters. It is this loophole that creates an opportunity for pirates, who act to meet a demand from British audiences for games that cannot otherwise be seen.
The number of pirated games is likely to grow because broadband take-up in the UK is high and growing. According to the media regulator, Ofcom, 65% of UK homes had a fixed broadband connection in the first quarter of 2009, up from 41% in 2006.
The Premier League said 1,800 cases of illegal streaming were dealt with last season, more than 90% of them successfully. It employs a company called NetResult to protect its intellectual property and either remove web content or shut down websites that are illegally streaming games.
The league is also embroiled, along with several other companies in the music and film industries, in a long-running legal battle with YouTube, which it accuses of illegally showing Premier League games. It is suing the video-sharing site, which is owned by internet giant Google, in a New York court.
