Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication: Content, copyright and carriage: Issues for sports media rights in the digital age

When Pittsburgh radio station KQV positioned paid observers just outside the walls of Forbes Field in the 1930s and retransmitted the play-by-play of games on its airwaves, it changed the way sports viewed media rights. At the time, the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club was involved in a rights agreement with KDKA radio. The Pirates successfully sued KQV for copyright infringement and KQV was forced to stop the practice. Subsequently, the court’s ruling established the club’s broadcast right, creating a valuable property right (Wong, 2002). Since that 1938 court decision, the world of media rights in sports has experienced many significant legal challenges, which have evolved as technology has changed from radio to television to streaming to social media. Most of the recent challenges can be synthesized into the areas of content, copyright, and carriage. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to review the relevant legal challenges in each of those areas as they have played out in the court system in the past few years, and hypothesize about future legal challenges to digital media rights in sports.