Introduction
The media rights landscape for professional sports in India has undergone a structural transformation of historic proportions in the period from 2022 to 2026. The sale of Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights in 2022, which saw JioCinema (the streaming platform of Reliance Industries’ subsidiary Viacom18) acquire digital rights for an unprecedented Rs. 23,575 crore for the five-year period from 2023 to 2027, while Star Sports retained linear television rights separately, marked the point at which digital streaming became the primary battleground for sports media in India rather than a secondary complement to broadcast television. The consequent legal disputes, spanning broadcasting rights exclusivity, anti-piracy enforcement, cable operator regulation, and the territorial scope of OTT platform obligations, have generated some of the most practically significant intellectual property litigation of recent years.
This article examines the legal framework governing sports broadcasting rights in India, analyses the major enforcement challenges arising from the television-to-streaming transition, reviews the Delhi High Court’s landmark dynamic injunction jurisprudence in anti-piracy cases involving live sports, and proposes reforms including the enactment of a Sports Broadcasting Rights Act that would rationalise the currently fragmented regulatory environment.
Legal Framework
Copyright Act 1957: Broadcast Reproduction Rights
The Copyright Act 1957 protects broadcasts as a separate category of work, distinct from the underlying creative works that a broadcast may contain. Section 37 vests “broadcast reproduction rights” in broadcasters, defined as the person who delivers the broadcast, for a period of twenty-five years from the broadcast. These rights give the broadcaster the exclusive right to rebroadcast the broadcast, cause the broadcast to be seen or heard by the public on payment of charges, and make any recording of the broadcast. Section 2(dd) defines “broadcast” to include communication to the public by any means of wireless diffusion, including satellite, and by wire.
The extension of “broadcast” to OTT streaming under the Copyright Act was settled by the 2012 amendment, which included communication through the internet within the definition of “communication to the public” under Section 2(ff). OTT streaming of a sporting event thus constitutes both a broadcast (creating broadcast reproduction rights in the OTT platform) and a communication to the public of the underlying works (creating rights enforceable by copyright owners in the event footage, graphics, commentary, and music).
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) holds the media rights to IPL matches by virtue of agreements with the franchisee clubs and through BCCI’s governance of the IPL tournament. BCCI licenses these rights exclusively to media companies through competitive auction, with separate licenses for digital and television rights since the 2022 auction. The exclusivity of these licenses is legally enforceable as a contractual right against the licensee’s competitors and as a copyright-based right against third parties who make unauthorised broadcasts or streams.
Regulation of Sports Broadcasting: The Sports Broadcasting Signals Act 2007
The Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act 2007 creates an obligation on rights holders for certain “sporting events of national importance” (including cricket matches played by the Indian national team) to share their broadcasting signals with Prasar Bharati (the public broadcaster operating Doordarshan) for free-to-air transmission to Indian audiences. This mandatory sharing obligation, which was designed to ensure that audiences without access to cable television or OTT platforms could view major sporting events, creates a tension with the exclusivity that rights holders seek to negotiate in commercial media rights agreements.
The 2007 Act does not expressly address OTT platforms, having been enacted before the streaming era. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has taken the position that OTT platforms fall within the mandatory sharing obligations where they broadcast “sporting events of national importance,” but this position has not been tested in court.
Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995
The Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995 and the regulations made under it govern the operation of cable television operators, including their obligations with respect to channel carriage and must-carry provisions. The transition from linear television to OTT streaming has created regulatory arbitrage: OTT platforms are currently regulated under a lighter-touch framework (primarily through the IT Rules 2021) compared to cable television operators. This regulatory asymmetry affects the competitive dynamics between cable television distribution and OTT streaming.
Judicial Developments
Dynamic Injunctions and Live Sports Piracy
The most significant judicial development in Indian sports broadcasting IP law in the period from 2020 to 2025 has been the Delhi High Court’s development and refinement of the “dynamic injunction” as a tool for combating live sports piracy. Dynamic injunctions are orders that direct internet service providers (ISPs) to block specified websites and, critically, automatically extend to block new URLs and mirror sites that replicate the same infringing content, without requiring the rights holder to return to court for each new URL.
The genesis of dynamic injunctions in Indian sports broadcasting law lies in a series of orders obtained by Viacom18 (Star’s predecessor as IPL digital rights holder before 2023) in the Delhi HC during the 2020 and 2021 IPL seasons. The Court’s orders directed ISPs to block websites that were streaming IPL matches without authorisation, and extended the blocking obligation to “mirror sites” that appeared after the original blocking orders were served.
The most technically sophisticated dynamic injunction framework for live sports was developed by the Delhi HC in Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Telegram Channels and Ors. (2023). In this case, JioCinema, as the newly appointed IPL digital rights holder, sought injunctions against Telegram channels that were distributing IPL match streams. The Court’s order created a framework under which JioCinema’s legal team could notify Telegram channels directly for takedown, with a specified response time of minutes rather than hours, and with ISP blocking orders available as an automatic escalation mechanism where Telegram failed to act promptly. The order also directed Google and other search engines to delist search results that directed users to infringing streams.
The John Doe Order Mechanism
Complementing dynamic injunctions is the “John Doe” order, also known as an “Ashok Kumar” order in Indian legal parlance (after early cases that named Ashok Kumar as a placeholder for unknown defendants). A John Doe order for sports piracy is an injunction against unnamed and yet-to-be-identified defendants, obtained in advance of a sporting event, that authorises the rights holder to notify ISPs and platforms of infringing URLs for immediate blocking without further court proceedings. This mechanism allows rights holders to respond to live sports piracy in real time rather than waiting for the courts to hear individual applications for each instance of infringement.
The Delhi HC has refined John Doe orders for sports broadcasting piracy through multiple IPL seasons, developing a standard order form that includes: identification of the sporting event and the rights holder; direction to ISPs to block URLs notified by the rights holder; direction to search engines to delist results; a compliance verification mechanism; and liberty to the rights holder to apply for modification if new forms of piracy are identified.
BCCI v. Cable Operators: Exclusivity Enforcement
The transition of IPL digital rights from Hotstar (Disney+) to JioCinema in 2023, combined with JioCinema’s decision to offer IPL streaming free of subscription charge (supported by advertising revenue), disrupted the established economics of cable television. Cable operators who had traditionally bundled sports channels in premium packages faced the competitive reality that JioCinema was offering better digital rights content for free. BCCI’s enforcement actions against cable operators who attempted to retransmit JioCinema’s IPL streams over cable networks without authorisation raised complex questions about the scope of broadcast reproduction rights and the carriage obligations of cable operators.
Contemporary Issues and Analysis
The IPTV Piracy Problem
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services that distribute pirated sports content through illicit set-top boxes represent one of the most technically sophisticated and commercially significant forms of sports broadcasting piracy in India. These services, often operated from outside India and marketed through social media, offer subscribers access to live sports streams, including IPL, FIFA World Cup, and Premier League matches, for a fraction of legitimate subscription costs. The technical architecture of IPTV piracy services, involving multiple server layers, encrypted streams, and frequent URL rotation, makes them significantly harder to block than static piracy websites.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting have been considering regulatory responses to IPTV piracy that would go beyond the current IT Rules 2021 framework, including requirements for ISPs to implement deep packet inspection to identify and block IPTV piracy traffic. Civil liberties concerns about deep packet inspection make this approach controversial, and no formal regulatory proposal has yet been adopted.
The Shifting Economics of Sports Rights
JioCinema’s decision to make IPL streaming free in 2023 and 2024, supported by advertising rather than subscription revenue, represented a fundamental shift in the economics of sports broadcasting in India. The free-to-air streaming model dramatically increased viewership (peak concurrent viewership for IPL 2023 reportedly exceeded 30 million), but created pressure on the subscription-based premium sports streaming market. The merger of JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar into JioStar in late 2024 consolidated India’s two largest sports streaming entities and created a dominant position in live sports rights that will attract regulatory scrutiny under the Competition Act 2002.
Comparative and International Perspective
The UK’s Football Association Premier League’s anti-piracy programme is the most advanced in the world and provides a direct model for the dynamic injunction approach that Indian courts have adopted. The FAPL v. BT (UK High Court, 2017) decision established that under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Court has jurisdiction to grant injunctions against ISPs requiring them to block access to live streaming piracy services, including services identified by IP address and sub-domain as they appear during the broadcast. The FAPL’s “season-wide” blocking orders, renewed at the beginning of each football season, provide blocking authority against identified piracy services throughout the season without requiring per-match applications.
Italy has implemented a similar “Piracy Shield” system since 2024, operated by the national telecommunications regulator AGCOM, which allows rights holders to submit piracy URLs for blocking within 30 minutes of identification, with automatic blocking by Italian ISPs within that timeframe. Italy’s regulatory-administered model differs from India’s court-administered model and demonstrates an alternative institutional approach.
Practical and Policy Implications
For sports rights holders, the Indian judicial environment for anti-piracy enforcement has become considerably more favourable since 2020, with dynamic injunctions providing real-time blocking capacity that did not previously exist. The practical challenge is the operational cost of real-time piracy monitoring: effective use of dynamic injunctions requires 24/7 monitoring teams during live sporting events, sophisticated URL identification tools, and dedicated legal teams to manage compliance.
For OTT platforms, the regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly and the demarcation between OTT streaming obligations and traditional broadcast obligations is becoming less clear as streaming platforms capture the majority of sports viewership. Compliance with the Sports Broadcasting Signals Act 2007’s mandatory sharing obligations, if extended to OTT platforms by regulatory interpretation or amendment, would significantly affect OTT sports rights economics.
For the Indian television industry, the shift of premium sports rights to OTT platforms has accelerated the decline of linear television viewership and advertising revenues. Regulatory policy needs to address the resulting market dislocation without imposing obligations that would deter investment in sports rights by OTT platforms.
Suggestions and Reforms
India should enact a Sports Broadcasting Rights Act that consolidates and updates the regulatory framework for sports media rights, replacing the 2007 Sports Broadcasting Signals Act and integrating OTT streaming explicitly into the regulatory framework. The Act should: define “broadcasting rights” broadly to include OTT streaming; specify which sporting events are of “national importance” requiring mandatory free-to-air access through Prasar Bharati; establish a statutory framework for dynamic injunctions in sports piracy cases, reducing dependence on developing these remedies through individual court orders; and create a statutory fast-track court process for sports piracy injunctions with target response times measured in hours rather than days.
The MIB should issue OTT broadcasting regulations that extend the mandatory sharing obligations of the 2007 Act to OTT platforms in a technology-neutral way, requiring that events of national importance be accessible through a free-to-air streaming option (whether on the rights holder’s OTT platform or through Doordarshan’s streaming service) regardless of the platform’s subscription model for other content.
The IT Rules 2021 should be amended to specifically address the obligations of ISPs and search engines in sports piracy cases, codifying the obligations established through dynamic injunction orders into a clear statutory framework. The amended Rules should specify maximum response times for ISP blocking of piracy URLs (analogous to Italy’s Piracy Shield) and should create a safe harbour for ISPs that comply promptly with blocking notifications from authorised rights holders.
Conclusion
The transformation of India’s sports broadcasting landscape from a linear television-dominated model to an OTT-primary model has outpaced the legal and regulatory framework that governs it. The Copyright Act 1957’s broadcast reproduction rights and the Delhi High Court’s dynamic injunction jurisprudence provide important legal tools for rights holders, but the absence of a comprehensive Sports Broadcasting Rights Act leaves significant regulatory gaps that affect both anti-piracy enforcement and the public access obligations that justify the government’s interest in sports broadcasting regulation.
The reforms proposed in this article, a Sports Broadcasting Rights Act, OTT mandatory sharing regulations, and IT Rules amendments for sports piracy enforcement, would provide a coherent and modern framework for governing sports media rights in India. The commercial stakes are substantial: India’s sports broadcasting market is valued at billions of dollars annually, and the legal certainty that a comprehensive regulatory framework would provide is essential for sustaining the levels of investment in sports media rights that have funded Indian cricket’s extraordinary global success.
