Two Web sites that promised video highlights of select World Cup soccer games have been forced offline by a legal threat from KirchMedia, which owns exclusive broadcast rights to the wildly popular international tournament.
KirchMedia, which owns the exclusive worldwide television, Internet and radio broadcast rights to the World Cup, demanded the shutdown of the WorldCup-02.com and Coupe-dumonde.com sites after clips of early-round games were streamed.
In a letter to James Sandham, a self-professed fan who runs the sites for Nokamu Ltd., KirchMedia said it had various exclusive contractual arrangements in place with licensees around the world relating to the exploitation of (the World Cup broadcast) rights and demanded the streams be turned off.
As part of a partnership between Yahoo and soccer's governing body FIFA, video clips of games are being sold for $19.95 at a co-branded fifaworldcup.yahoo.com site, but Sandham said the creation of the two sites were meant to "object to the charging of content on the internet."
"The fact that FIFA wanted to charge $20 for their content, I find offensive. Their content is poorly defined, the videos are of shocking quality and I don't think they really understand what the public want from these kind of services," he argued.
News source: Internet News
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