New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has prohibited telecom operators and mobile value added service (VAS) providers from giving live updates of cricket matches and said the Star India TV channel has the “exclusive media rights” over cricket matches organised by the Indian cricket board till 2018.
The court asked telecoms operators and mobile VAS providers to either disseminate score updates that were deferred by 15 minutes or pay a fair share of revenue generated through broadcast of live scores to Star India by procuring a licence.
It allowed the plea of Star India Pvt Ltd seeking a restraining order against the telecoms operators and others.
Justice M L Mehta, in an interim order, said: “A limited interim injunction is ordered restraining the defendants(telecom operators and others) 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.”
Star India has the exclusive media rights to cricket matches organised by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) till 2018.
The channel on August 10, 2012 spent Rs35.81bn and won the bid for the media rights agreement with the BCCI, which had assigned exclusive media rights to the Star channel over the cricket matches, organised by it, till 2018.
The court said that the telecoms operators and others can report “noteworthy information” or “news” after a “time gap of 15 minutes” after the telecast of the match.
IANS
