Russian company sues Twitch over alleged illegal soccer streams
Streaming service Twitch is facing a lawsuit from Russian internet provider, Rambler Group, for $3 billion (18 billion roubles). The allegations? Illegal streaming of Premiere League soccer games through the platform.
According to the Russian company, Twitch violated its exclusive English streaming rights of Premiere League soccer games in Russia. Rambler Group asserts that their exclusive right was violated 36000 times in the final months of 2019. As a result, they are seeking to completely ban Twitch from Russia.
However, Twitch’s lawyer claims that the company only grants user access to the platform for video streaming. Despite clear terms and conditions that assert illegal content is prohibited and efforts to eliminate violations, the lawyer argues that Twitch is unable to manage all streamed content.
This debacle between Twitch and Rambler Group is just one of millions alleged piracy cases. Managing global rights can get very complex.
Broadcasting content has legal limitations — the streaming company must own the right to broadcast a specific version of the content, on a certain platform, in a specific area, at a certain time, to a certain audience, through a certain monetization method, etc.
For example, if in the United States, The Hunger Games is on Netflix, this means Netflix has the right to stream the movie through an SVOD (subscription video-on-demand) license in the United States. However, that may mean that in France, Netflix might not be able to stream the same movie.
Each right has multiple dimensions.
One dimension of a right is the licenses associated with it. A company might have the VOD (video-on-demand) license for a film. However, this category can further split into other licenses, such as SVOD (subscription video-on-demand), TVOD (transactional video-on-demand), and AVOD (ad-supported).
A distributor might buy all VOD rights then sell SVOD to Netflix, TVOD to Apple, and AVOD to Vudu, for example. And it’s possible that these can be broken down even further into many smaller pieces.
On top of the licenses, there are territories to consider with a right as well. These can be as discrete or continuous as one might want to go, from worldwide to a country, city, or even zip code, sprinkled with international waters as well.
And then, there is also the dimension of time. Every right could start and ends at a predetermined time, but it could also be triggered by certain events, such as date of first broadcast, or date of cinematic release.
Seemingly simple terms can lead to grand consequences if violated. In this example, the Russian broadcast company exclusively held English broadcast rights for streaming Premiere League soccer in Russia. Now, Twitch is facing a lawsuit.
What is more fascinating is that architecture of rights is ever evolving. As technology advances, rights evolve. Today’s rights are drastically different from rights five years ago.
Five years from now, rights will likely look different again — there might be categories of rights that do not exist today. For example, one might be able to own a license for territories that may not even be on planet Earth, or perhaps a license for platforms enabled by virtual reality.
It is clear that media streaming is facing rapid growth from increased adoption around the world. Managing global intellectual property rights cannot be solved by throwing more people at the problem. It has to be more clever, more organized, and more automated.
Millions of checks need to be run on each right in real-time, since rights are ever evolving. That calls for fundamental redesign of intellectual property rights management for the media industry. That calls for Molten.
MOLTEN (Media Operations Leveraging Technology and Emergent Networks) is an upstart out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is building a modern infrastructure for digital media — one that protects rights, distributes content globally, and verifiably accounts for every penny earned.
Learn more at MoltenRights.com
