Everyone's Watching: A Comparative Study of Sports Media Rights

This book argues that the audio and audiovisual content covering a sports event is in principle protected under the general rubric of copyright laws, yet that such protection is not spelled out. In order to prove their ownership and right to copyright protection, the owners of sports media rights either argue such protection and ownership before a court using the broader principles defining works protected by copyright law such as the protection of broadcasts, or using the provisions of other laws such as civil law or contract law. In response, this book proposes that copyright law should remedy such a deficiency by covering audio/ audiovisual feeds of a sports event in a separate chapter in the law, the same way a cinematographic work is treated. Accordingly, a definition of a sports media right as type of audio/ audiovisual work needs to be added to copyright norms across a host of jurisdictions, including Egypt. This book should be especially useful to legal practitioners and other professionals working in the media field in general, and in the sports and advertising fields in particular.