A landmark judgment from the Delhi High Court, with Justice ML Mehta presiding, delivered a couple of days ago, allows STAR limited exclusive rights to dissemination of Cricket scores and ball by ball updates of Cricket matches, and has validated the Hot News concept to India. What the judgement contends is that for a limited time period (15 minutes), facts - apart from noteworthy events - related to what is occurring on the Cricket pitch belong to the BCCI, and hence STAR (to which BCCI has assigned these rights). We'd written about the implications of this case when it began, and we'll have more on specific arguments made in course; we attended all the hearings. However, a public notice issued by STAR (screenshot below) contends that Telecom and Mobile VAS companies have been barred from using live match updates without prior license from Star. The judgement (read it here) states clearly: I hereby order the following: a. A limited interim injunction restraining the defendants from disseminating contemporaneous match information in the form of ball-by-ball or minute-by-minute score updates/match alerts for a premium, without obtaining a license from the plaintiff. b. There shall be no restriction upon the defendants to report noteworthy information or news from cricket matches (as discussed in paragraph 49), as and when they arise, because stale news is no news. c. There shall be no requirement for the license if the defendants do it gratuitously or after a time lag of 15 minutes. Thus - and this is…
