Double standard,football and tv.

Many of the links to the soccer games are legit.

Almost none of the links to tv-shows are legit.

If one of the former is not legit and is brought to the attention of the mods we will remove it.

This thread has a very short life span.

DeV.

Iraq goals aren't sanctioned by the EPL?

There are legal streams of tv shows for viewers in certain regions such as the BBC Iplayer for UK viewers and the many sites in the US such as NBC and Hulu.
There are also illegal sites.

Its exactly the same as soccer.

GuanYin wrote: »

I commend your ability to read and repeat.

I took your post as only applying to sports.

So yes, we are aware of it, we've made the issue known to the bosses, but soccer streams are not like TV streams in any way in terms of the legality.

I'm saying that there are legal tv streams which is exactly the same thing as soccer.

We discussed this last week with the Admins and Boards.ie Overlords (and our resident legal consultant ).

There is no actual legal issue with stream links and many of them are perfectly legitimate in certain regions. There are some that I can watch freely in the US (ESPN shows Champions League online) that you can't in Europe, unless you have an application or proxy. We can't moderate whether people use such issues and we have enough foreign boards.ie members that I don't think it would be right or fair to limit streams to a region.

We do monitor for obvious illegal activity with streaming, but this is a moral decision by boards.ie and not anything that we could get in trouble for.

So yes, we are aware of it, we've made the issue known to the bosses, but soccer streams are not like TV streams in any way in terms of the legality.

To be fair, the links frequently posted on the soccer forum are not to legitimate, legal streams. They are clearly of an illegal nature.

This is dangerous ground for boards.ie. The rights-holders have been taking more and more of a stand on this, and they have been putting sites offline.

There are no definites in the world of law but we have been given very clear assurances that we are not responsible for the legality of what is linked to on Boards. In fact we've known this from the start, we simply CHOSE to limit bittorrents and other links of that nature, simply because I dont believe its a sustainable system of music and media production.

So, we take a "we dont want illegal links here" approach simply from a Good Citizenship point of view. However in certain circumstances I wouldnt have a problem with someone linking something copy-free like How Battlestar Galactica Killed Television (an excellent piece every media manager should watch, the guy is very clever, though its a touch dated now).

So the question becomes one of legitimacy and how we determine it. On review I believe that many of the sports links are legit and ok. Some are obviously NOT and they will be removed. If you are concerned, report the post and it will be reviewed.

This is not really much different its just that Bittorrents are so hard to check and so often illegitimate that we put the burden of proof on the linker. With the sports it seems more common to be legit (notice that rather then using Bittorrent, they stream from sites... a practise which tends to indicate a higher degree of legitimacy).

We do have double, triple and quadruple standards around here. What you can say in AH would get you banned from PI. I dont have a problem with that, I'm a big-boy

But in terms of linking to video i dont see a particular difference here except that we are less suspicious of sports links.

What would be your solution?

DeV.

I understand what you are saying but its really semantics. I'm not concerned about the legality of "linking", I'm concerned about the legality of whats LINKED to.

Faulty Towers is copywritten material and so shouldnt be linked to in any manner if we are to be Good Citizens [tm].


It just seems to me that sports links tend to be more commonly legit then say bittorrents.


DeV.

Sorry, perhaps I havent been clear.

If there is a link to something which you consider illegal or copywritten, you should report it.


However, Eircom have been known to advertise over Pokertube.com and they seem perfectly legit and have made arrangements with the rights holders.

If Justin.tv is showing something which is illegal, report it and it will be dealt with.

DeV.

Most of the soccer links are to games not shown in the UK & Ireland on TV. The rights holders for the territories we live in choose not to show the games.

That's of no consequence, really. Rights-holders can do what they want with the rights. Just because they choose not to show them, it doesn't mean it's open season for everybody else.

We just want to watch our team killjoys.

Yeah, great. See also:

We just want to watch a new movie, killjoys.
We just want to listen to the latest albums, killjoys.
We just want to play free videogames, killjoys.

Online streaming of sports may have slipped under the radar in the past, but make no mistake: it is a huge issue now. It has been raised at EU level, and broadcasters like Sky - who pay huge sums for these rights - are going to protect their investment.