'A battle between enraged bulls' : the 2009 Australian Senate Inquiry into Sports News and Digital Media

![CDATA[On 14 May 2009, the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts handed down a Report after completing an Inquiry into ‘The Reporting of Sports News and the Emergence of Digital Media’. Called by the Federal Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, the Inquiry sought, in the words of one Senator, ‘to shine a light on sometimes quite intractable disputes in this area’. The scale and intensity of these disputes, described in one submission as a ‘battle between enraged bulls’ (Davies, 2009), can be measured by the profile and power of many of the 44 organisations that made submissions and whose representatives appeared over the three-and-a-half days of hearings in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. These organisations included the Australian Football League (AFL), National Rugby League (NRL), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), News Limited, Hutchison Telecoms, Yahoo!7 and the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). The Inquiry’s hearings and Final Report have been the subject of close attention both in Australia and overseas, representing the first time that a national government has intervened in this area of commercial news and sporting activity. Competing claims made during the Inquiry were, in the main, two-fold. First, sports organisations demanded guidance and/or legislation clarifying how the fair dealing exception for the reporting of news in the Copyright Act should operate online, particularly with regard to the placement of moving and still digital images on news websites. It was frequently asserted that existing news reporting arrangements online were infringing the intellectual property rights of sports organisations. In response, some major sports organisations had imposed highly restrictive accreditation and access terms on journalists and news organisations. Second, and in opposition to this position, news organisations demanded a right of access to ‘public sporting events’ under fair and reasonable terms, frequently claiming that such access was in the public interest. As might be expected, the Committee’s Recommendations satisfied neither side completely, although some demands made by a range of sports organisations were rejected outright. This paper concentrates on the first set of claims relating to fair dealing and the Copyright Act, highlighting the centrality of sport in the operation of the media and culture industries, as well as in broader contemporary culture.]]