MUMBAI, 18 April 2008 — The much-hyped Indian Premier League (IPL), attempting to showcase almost all the leading cricketers of the world in one tournament, ran into its first major problem.
A hasty retreat on its stubborn stand to rein in the media saw the organizers, read the Board of Control for Cricket in India, overcome the same, but only partially. The fallout of the solution, however, is going to prove irksome in the long run.
What had upset the media was a particularly draconian condition for the grant of accreditation for the 45-day long Twenty20 tournament. The stiff condition underlined the demand that all media organizations, seeking accreditation, submit all images captured by them (published photographs) to the organizers within 24 hours of their first publication.
The proviso further states that the same be downloaded to the sole-rights owner at their own expense. The IPL has sold the media rights to a US-based company for 50 million dollars, hence the demand.
After a threat of boycott of the event by the print-media, issued jointly by the Editors’ Guild and the Sports Journalists’ Federation of India, the IPL Commissioner, Lalit Modi immediately called truce by agreeing to withdraw the controversial clause.
Whoever decided to put forth this strange condition had not realized that it would directly infringe the copyrights of the newspapers covering the event. Whatever is published by them, articles or pictures, automatically becomes their sole property and is protected by the copyright law.
The websites, however, continue to be debarred from publishing any article or pictures of any of the matches for at least 24 hours since the end of that particular match. The organizers forgot that newspapers also have on-line editions and that they cannot toe the restrictive line.
A compromise has been arrived at on this matter as well. But pure websites have been left holding the can. There are over a dozen well-known cricket websites and they can now only pick up stale news. The plight of hundreds of other websites will be worse, as they cannot even buy inputs from agencies.
The photo-agencies, as such, have been barred from passing on their stuff to subscribers. That restriction has not been removed as yet.
Two of the world’s leading agencies, along with India’s own, have decided to boycott the event whose opening is only a week ahead.
Any event can only be as popular as the media makes it out to be. After all, who will provide all the information that the organizers wish to issue. No one is going to be glued for 24 hours to the particular TV channel that has the world rights for the event. Isn’t the IPL hitting the axe on its own feet?
