Live-Streaming Apps and Sporting Events – Copyright Law Concerns

The right to televise sporting events is one of the most valuable commodities in the broadcasting sector. When reports surfaced that live-streaming apps, such as Periscope and Meerkat, had been used to transmit live streams of the "fight of the century" between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao on 2 May 2015, they raised the issue of the copyright implications of these kinds of applications.

The legality of web streaming is still considered a grey area because, although the stream creates a copy of a file on a person's computer, that copy is temporary and is stored exclusively to allow uninterrupted playing of that file. In a 2014 decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union (C-360/13) ruled that, in the course of viewing a website, all copies made on an end-user's computer screen and in the cache of that computer's hard disk "satisfy the conditions [of Art. 5 of the Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC)] that those copies must be temporary, that they must be