Cases

FA Premier League Ltd v QC Leisure & Ors

Facts

PL owned various copyrights in the feed of each Premier League football match as sold to foreign broadcasters. The foreign broadcasters are required by the terms of their licence agreement with PL to undertake to procure that no device is knowingly authorised or enabled so as to permit anyone to view any such match outside their particular licensed territory. PL claimed that the Ds supplied pubs in the UK with non-UK decoder cards sourced through subterfuge from a variety of countries within and outside the EU (and operated such pubs) and that these actions infringed their rights under s.298 of the CDPA 1988 and their copyrights in the footage. Ds claimed that the cross-border trade in decoder cards was lawful even without PL’s consent under the CDPA and certain provisions of EC law, including in particular Directive 98/84/EC (the Conditional Access Directive), and sought a reference to the European Court of Justice.

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