Football Association Premier League Ltd. v. QC Leisure

Football Association Premier League Ltd. (FAPL) (plaintiff) ran the Premier League, the leading professional-football league for football clubs in England. FAPL’s activities included the filming of Premier League matches and the transmission of the signal to broadcasters that had rights for those matches, which FAPL licensed on an exclusive territorial basis. To protect that exclusiveness, the license required each broadcaster to encrypt the satellite signal sent to subscribers in their respective territories, and subscribers required the use of a decoder device to decrypt the signal. FAPL sued numerous public house (pub) operators (defendants), claiming defendants had supplied pubs in the United Kingdom (UK) with non-UK decoder devices, allowing those pubs to receive a satellite transmission from another licensed territory with a less-expensive subscription than that for the UK’s broadcaster. FAPL alleged pubs infringed its rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988 (CDPA) by trading in or being in possession of foreign decoding devices designed or adapted to give access to the services of FAPL without authorization. The High Court of Justice of England and Wales referred the following question to the Court of Justice of the European Union: Does the Treaty of the Function of the European Union preclude legislation of a Member State that makes it unlawful to import into and sell and use in that State foreign decoding devices that give access to an encrypted satellite-broadcasting service from another Member State that includes subject-matter protected by the legislation in the first State?