The English Premier League and the European Champions League have been popular with Kenyan football fans, who regularly glue to their television screens, both at home and entertainment joints, to cheer their favourite teams.
Unfortunately, some culprits have taken advantage of the popular game and have been reaping where they have not sown. A total of 141 sites have been streaming live matches, denying the content owner, MultiChoice Kenya, the much-needed revenue.
Last week, however, the High Court was on their case as Justice Wilfrida Okwany directed the two telecoms, Safaricom and Jamii Telecom, to block the sites after MultiChoice served them with a notice in October 2019.
Research conducted by Partners Against Piracy (PAP) revealed that Kenya loses about Sh92 billion yearly to online piracy. The culprits deny the government billions of shillings in tax, besides destroying jobs. PAP is an initiative started by the Kenya Copyright Board in March 2020 to fight the damage caused by copyright infringements as illegal users exploit content online for financial gain, without any payments to the creators, producers, or exclusive rights holders.
The pay-TV firm moved to court in 2019, accusing the telcos of allowing the sites to re-broadcast and replicate exclusive content without authorisation. Subscribers to Multichoice’s DStv and Gotv packages pay a monthly fee, but those streaming the games on the controversial sites only incur data costs. Evidence tabled in court was that MultiChoice issued the takedown notices in October 2019, but the telcos ignored, arguing the firm did not describe in detail the copyrighted work that was infringed and that they could not locate the specific sites within the domains.
According to Jamii Telecom, some of the pirate sites redirected users to other links, which hosted the protected content, and blocking such sites would have no effect as the content would still be accessed, either way. For its part, Safaricom said it sent notices to 84 sites, with some of them ignored. An investigator, Mr Barry Patrick Cole, said there were 141 piracy domains, which were accessible on and off at any given time depending on the number of people accessing the site.
He told court that some of them would change from time to time and that they had developed specialised techniques to track pirates’ addresses, which could change from time to time as pirates move from one source to the next. The witness said 89 per cent of the sites were accessed using Safaricom, while 66 per cent were accessed by Jamii Telecom.
Safaricom also feared that complying with the order would affect the rights of other copyright holders, and complying with the notice might damage its reputation. The telco claimed it might also attract civil and criminal lawsuits as some of the repercussions from attempts to control the behaviours of its subscribers.
But MultiChoice said the pirates were faceless third parties, and Safaricom cannot purport to speak for them. It said SuperSport had acquired exclusive broadcast and transmission rights for European Super Cup, Champions, Europa and English Premier leagues, and La Liga in Kenya and other sub-Saharan African countries and the infringement is denting its revenues.
