Football and the problem with its real tweets

Let’s be clear – while this whole licensing issue may not be sorted in time for this season, it will not go away.

If you’re unsure what I’m going on about, have a read of Chris Lakey’s EDP column from Saturday which explains it all nicely.

Basically, the Pinkun.com ‘third man’ coverage – in fact, any supposed live internet coverage from a newspaper or the such – is banned.

It’s buy a PA feed or starve, say DataCo – the licensing body and, unsurprisingly, partners with… the Press Association.

We are still working on a way of trying to bring you live updates on what is happening with City – as should be expected from a local media group – without annoying anyone.

However, we have also been warned Twitter updates still count as publication and, unless we keep to our licensed windows – which is one publication, or tweet, every 10 minutes – we’ll run the risk of being booted out of games completely.

Fact, fiction, opinion or simply answering a question… they all count. So it seems freedom of speech isn’t quite so free on Twitter during a football match.

And this is why, however long the debate rumbles on, the corner DataCo are backing newspapers into is, to be quite honest, a dreamland.

Firstly, not one fan at Carrow Road, Bramall Lane or Turf Moor next season will stop sending their tweets because they already did one nine minutes ago. To have one rule for the public and one for the media is hypocritical and, in the long run, unworkable.

And now dear old Vital Norwich – a website I used to edit while I did my journalism qualifications – has promised live updates, presumably from listening to the radio because they won’t be at the ground, therefore with nothing to lose in filling part of the void left by the seemingly destined Pinkun live blackout.

I have no problem with Vital doing this – I tried to do something similar while I was on it – but it’s another big flashing light that DataCo have got their entire attitude wrong on web coverage.

The answer is straightforward for me. DataCo have a responsibility to license coverage – not ban it. So produce a workable licence. Done.

Can you imagine BBC Radio Norfolk being told they can only do live commentary so long as Chris Goreham is locked in a cupboard and they use a DataCo supplied, dull as dishwater and often inaccurate voiceover man? Ridiculous.

Makes you think next time you want to tweet updates from the football – although you should be all right as long as you’re not in the press box.

The issue will not go away, I’m sure, until people start getting real about the internet, football and the fact people, wherever they are, want to join in discussing it and enjoying it.

Words and opinions are not the same as sounds and pictures, TV or radio. The web is a completely different animal and needs to be treated as such.

DataCo, and most likely some of the Football League and Premier League clubs, will say their actions are about protecting their intellectual property rights – which apparently means independent coverage of sporting events now amounts to somewhere between piracy and copyright infringement.

How can the fans and tweeters steal what we all have a share in?

posted on 19 July 2010 17:51 byMichael Bailey - Sportsdesk

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