HC upholds Star India's rights over cricket broadcast

The Delhi High Court has upheld broadcaster Star India's exclusive rights to Indian cricket and told mobile operator Idea Cellular and online platforms Onmobile and Crickbuzz to desist from providing ball-by-ball coverage to their customers, reports Pavni Mittal of CNBC-TV18.

That's the decision the Delhi High Court has arrived at, to the question of whether mobile companies and online platforms can provide customers with ball-by-ball coverage of Indian cricket matches, when the rights for these matches have been bought by Star India.
 
Last September, Star India had moved the court against Crickbuzz, Onmobile and Idea Cellular for infringing upon its exclusive rights -- rights it bought from BCCI for Rs 3,851 crore. Star India, not surprisingly, is jumping with joy.
 Uday Shankar, CEO, Star India, says that there was total chaos everyone was coming in and going in a chaotic way. There was no respect for licenses, IP and lot of fly by night operators were trying to benefit from it. The court order has set its importance for us because we were paying Rs 50 lakhs for digital and Rs 50 lakhs for mobile and we were the legitimate licensee holders and we were not able to benefit from it, even though the content for which we were the licensee holders, others were making money out of it.
Idea Cellular refused to comment saying it was still studying the court order and Star India is not willing to put a figure to the losses it has sustained from this infringement. However, it says it is open to chalking out specific content-sharing agreements with both telecom companies and websites for live coverage and till then, these platforms have the option of sharing score updates with a 15-minute delay.