Here we go again: With (Winter) Cricket season in India about to begin, STAR India, which holds rights to domestic and international matches hosted by the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), has sent out notices to application developers, warning them against providing access to content related to the India versus West Indies series, which is being held from October 8th to November 19th. What's pertinent is that STAR was warned against providing ball-by-ball content, updates, live or "near-live" match score, match scorecards or match score feeds, apart from audio or text commentary. This is apart from providing match footage and audio visual content. We'd like to remind our readers that, as far as we understand, STAR's right to exclusively provide ball by ball commentary, alerts and score cards haven't yet been established yet, and their case against Idea Cellular, Onmobile and Cricbuzz, is still in the Supreme Court of India. In October last year, STAR had gotten an interim injunction against Idea, Onmobile and Cricbuzz. The case went to the Supreme Court after STAR lost at the division bench level in the Delhi High Court. A critical statement in the judgment, then: ‘Neither Star nor BCCI can be permitted to say that mentioning “mobile” rights and auctioning them, would ipso facto legitimize the parcelling away of right to disseminate information, without first establishing that the right or exclusive domain over such rights existed in the first instance.’ Essentially, this means that before you license rights, you should…
