The Arabic current affairs network's sister station Al Jazeera Sports Plus is being used by a number of English pubs to screen Premier League football matches, without paying the expensive subscriptions to Sky, which owns the UK rights.
Al Jazeera Sport Plus is just one of the stations used by pubs to screen the games. Other channels broadcasting from Greece and the Czech Republic are also used. The pubs usually turn down the foreign-language commentary.
The Football Association, which brokers the broadcasting deals from which the clubs benefit, says that by circumventing the Sky subscription the pubs are in breach of the law.
According to a report in The New York Times, a group of pubs in Portsmouth that have been prosecuted for showing matches from Arabic and Greek channels are fighting back with a legal fund.
They argue that they are not breaking the law because of European legislation on free trade.
Earlier attempts by Sky and the FA to prosecute pubs were dropped in July. There had been a number of cases where landlords were acquitted because courts found that they were not being dishonest because they believed that screening the games from foreign channels was legal.
Pubs pay in the region of £6,000 to screen Sky games for a season, while a subscription for Al Jazeera Sports Plus can cost around £300, according to reports.
Sky has paid around £1bn for the rights to screen matches between 2004 and 2007. It recoups this money by selling to bars and pubs as well as to home subscribers, who can pay up to £40 a month for football packages.
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