3 Count: Matching Rights

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1: Warner Bros. Discovery Sues the NBA After League Rejects Matching Rights Proposal

First off today, Alex Weprin at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that Warner Bros. Discovery has filed a lawsuit against the NBA, alleging that the league unlawfully rejected their matching offer.

On Wednesday, the NBA announced a new deal that will see NBA games and related shows on Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon. This notably cut Warner out of the rights deal, which starts with the 2025 season.

According to Warner, they had a matching rights deal in their prior contract. However, they claimed that the NBA failed to allow them to match the deals offered by the three new services. As such, they are suing in hopes of regaining at least some of the rights to NBA content.

2: Chris Levine’s Queen Elizabeth II Portraits at Centre of Multi-Million-Pound Copyright Row

Next up today, Anny Shaw at The Art Newspaper reports that UK artist Chris Levine is in a copyright battle with The Jersey Heritage Trust over portraits it commissioned of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Jersey Heritage Trust is a non-profit organization that interacts with the royal family on behalf of the Jersey government. In 2003, the organization commissioned Levine to create holographic portraits of the Queen. To that end, Levine had two sittings with the Queen, one in 2003 and another in 2004.

The two sides have long butted heads over the rights to these portraits. They reached a settlement in 2015, but now both sides are accusing each other of breaching that agreement. The Trust claims that Levine has been unlawfully using images from the 2004 sitting, which they argue is part of their original commissions. Meanwhile, Levine claims that the Trust has not paid the required royalties for the use of the original work.

3: Pirate IPTV Services Blocked For Pirating The Olympics

Finally today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been targeting pirated IPTV sites and services that offer illegal streams of the Olympic Games.

In a recent judgment, the Paris Judicial Court ordered ISPs to block approximately 30 domains. These blocks are also dynamic injunctions, meaning that they will apply to any future domains the sites move to.

According to a local newspaper, the list had been in the works since at least April. However, it appears that at least some of the sites are already defunct, making the block superfluous.

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