The English Premier League has pledged to clamp down on fans posting videos of goals from its football matches online through video sharing service Vine.
Owned by social networking site Twitter, Vine allows fans to upload unofficial clips of football matches that can be viewed for free.
Ahead of its 2014-15 season, which launches tomorrow (Saturday), Premier League director of communications Dan Johnson warned that such activity is in breach of copyright laws and outlined plans to protect the organisation’s intellectual property.
"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law," he told UK public-service broadcaster the BBC. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity. I know it sounds as if we're killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property."
UK pay-television broadcasters BSkyB and BT Sport hold broadcast rights to the Premier League for the three seasons from 2013-14 to 2015-16, while newspaper group News UK holds digital clips rights across the same period.
Dean Scoggins, deputy head of sport for News UK publication The Sun, said: “It's important to underline that it's illegal to do this, we've obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it, we've got legal teams talking with them about what we can do.”