Sport derives a huge amount of its funding from media rights. Sport’s property rights are also challenged through ambush marketing, counterfeit goods, illegal use of copyrighted material (e.g. fake websites selling tickets) and betting companies using sports' intellectual property to make profit.

Much of this argument has a European background, although the UK’s Digital Economy Act and Hargreaves Review mean there is constant change in the UK.

The Alliance works very closely with the Sports Rights Owners Coalition to help protect our members intellectual property rights. SROC brings sports together in order to:

• fully recognise, protect and promote the special nature of sport and sports rights
• provide comprehensive protection for sports rights, including their names, logos and marks
• prevent the theft of sports events broadcasts by pirates
• outlaw ambush marketing and ticket-touting/scalping
• create a regime for sports betting that enables sport to protect its integrity, and establishes a fair return to sports for the use of their events by betting operators.

Current status

• Continual review of the Digital Economy Act (2011) through measures such as the Hargreaves Review (2011) means ongoing work at a national level.
• The EU continues to hold stakeholder engagement workshops to create a single European Market. The ECJ ruling on the Murphy Case (October 2011) ruled that satellite decoders are transferable between countries – but still gave some protection for sports with respects to their copyright.

Further information

Download brief (pdf)

Alliance response to the consultation on the Green Paper on the online distribution of audiovisual works in the European Union (Nov 2011)