Internet piracy has moved beyond illegal downloading of music and movies. And its newest, and quite lucrative, target is the sports broadcasting industry. Countless websites are now, illegally, streaming live telecasts of prominent sporting events as diverse as the English premier league in football, the Indian Premier League in cricket, the NBA in basketball. A new ‘Background Report on Digital Piracy of Sporting Events’, commissioned by the sports rights owners coalition (SROC), and conducted by Net Results and Envisional, two expert firms in tracking violation of IP on the internet (basically web detectives), was released in Geneva last week, and highlights the vast scale of the problem and the difficulties in clamping down on it.

Perhaps the biggest victim of internet piracy is football broadcasting but that’s not surprising given the popularity of the game. The report tracked 177 infringing sites for the English Premier League alone in 2007-08, 27 per cent of which were actually charging their users for illegal feed. Most of the piracy is via P2P services (where users log on to a shared network/feed) and the remaining minority is unicast (directly streamed to the viewer) based. Somewhat surprisingly, given its limited geographical market, cricket is the next biggest victim. According to the report, over nine cricket events between 2005 and April 2008, including the ICC cricket world cup and the Indian Premier League, were streamed illegally through 941 individual sites. The IPL has become a prominent victim of internet piracy — an illegal streaming of a Rajasthan Royals vs Delhi Daredevils match was viewed by 120,000 people. Incidentally, the highest number of views for a single illegally streamed cricket match is as high as 700,000, according to the report. As with other activities on the internet, it is difficult to trace and identify those responsible for putting up the sites — they often register with false names and addresses and usually operate out of countries with weak laws and weaker enforcement.

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