Are you a fan of watching GIFs and Vines of Premier League goals? Then we've got some potentially bad news for you.
According to the Premier League's director of communications Dan Johnson, who spoke with the BBC recently, the Premier League is going to do whatever it takes to prevent people from posting GIFs and Vines to social media sites like Twitter moving forward. It seems they've got a real problem with folks "stealing" their content and re-purposing it for the Web without their permission. So they're going to start trying to police it during the upcoming season.
"It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it," Johnson said. "We're developing technologies like GIF crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity."
Translation: You are probably going to see a decline in the number of Premier League-related GIFs and Vines circulating next season.
As Gizmodo points out, it's not entirely surprising that the Premier League would try to do this, seeing as how they have huge contracts with media outlets like The Sun and Sky Sports. But is there anyway they're going to be able to take down every GIF and Vine that goes up? And is it a good idea for them to do it in the first place and essentially call out their own fan base for taking an interest in the Premier League?
Let's see how this all shakes out once the season actually starts.
[via Gizmodo]
