On Dec 29 last year the Pakistan Cricket Board gave exclusive global SMS rights to cricket matches involving the Pakistan Cricket team to Vectracom. Of course, the problem with this is that for there to be a cricket match there has to be two countries playing — so the PCB effectively sold the rights of the other nations’ teams as well.
The Madras High Court has restrained mobile phone operators, websites and other content providers from giving cricket scores and updates on the ongoing one-day cricket series between India and Pakistan. The restraint will apply for four weeks, by which time the series will be over.
The companies that have been asked to stop live updates include Airtel, BSNL, Reliance Infocomm, Hutchison Essar, Idea Cellular, Aircel Cellular, Spice Telecom, Tata Indicom, Sify, Yahoo Webservices Ltd, Indiatimes, IMI Mobile, PhonyTunes.com, Rediff.com, Pyro Mobile, ON Mobile Asia-Pacific and CricInfo India.
So what happens when the India Cricket Board sells the exclusive global rights to another company? No-one can send SMS score updates? Vectracom will find the deal pretty useless if it can’t offer score updates on any game Pakistan plays with another country…(via our sistersite ContentSutra)
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