Daily News & Ananlysis: Chennai High Court restrains SMS alerts on Indo-Pak ODIs
Chennai High Court has stayed all mobile phone companies in India from offering India-Pakistan cricket scores on mobile - for now.
A Pakistani company claims to have acquired exclusive rights to provide SMS scores on mobile phones.
To my knowledge, this may be an unsustainable right. Further arguments in courts would clear this.
Normally rights holders - such as PCB or BCCI - control exclusive access to the stadium and exclusive coverage of the events in audio visual formats. However, once an event is broadcast in the form of video or audio, any reporter anywhere in the world can consume the information, process the information and create content for consumption to general audience. Rightsholder cannot continue to administer subsequent stages of this information dissemination.
Once a fact has come to the public space (that Pakistan has won the toss), PCB cannot demand that the right to inform others that Pakistan has won the toss through mobile phones is still controlled by PCB.
In the current scenario that is what M/s Marksman Marketing Services Pvt Ltd. of Chennai are claiming on behalf of M/s Vectracom Pvt Ltd and PCB.
Currently cricket scores on mobile phones are made available by all the mobile operators in India and also through these phones by all key portals such as Rediff, Yahoo!, Sify, Indiatimes, NDTV and Cricinfo as well as several others.
In a way this is a good case to follow to find out what the Indian courts think of mobile text rights.
Watch this space!
There may be a difference between disseminating content, say, the cricket score by a spectator to his friends and dissimination by the cellphone operator as a paid service.The latter will be a violation of the rights because money is made with the content owned by the rightholder without giving him his share.
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