Indian Premier League Faces Boycott

A boycott of cricket's inaugural Indian Premier League by media organizations is looking more likely after the two sides failed to resolve a row over digital rights.

News organizations have balked at the terms offered by the competition's organizers, which include preventing websites from covering matches and forbidding news agencies from supplying images to online operations.

A deadline to break the deadlock passed last night with both sides apparently refusing to back down.

It is understood that some British newspapers are among the groups that have protested to the IPL, challenging some of their accreditation conditions.

The IPL is reported to have sold the new media rights to the Twenty20 tournament to an unnamed US web company in a $50m deal.

The Indian Newspaper Society has already threatened to boycott the IPL, which starts next Friday, April 18.

"The accreditation terms failed to address the issues of intellectual property rights belonging to media as well as issues of press freedom," the INS president, Bahubali Shah, said in a statement.

"The Indian Newspaper Society hopes a serious attempt will be made by the Indian Premier League to remove offending terms and conditions for media accreditation.

"In the absence of remedial action by the Indian Premier League, members of the Indian Newspaper Society will be forced to take an adverse view on the question of coverage of IPL matches."

The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers, has attacked the IPL's "greed and arrogance and total lack of common sense", predicting a media boycott.

In the UK, the Newspaper Publishers Association has branded the proposed rules "some of the most restrictive and burdensome access arrangements ever seen".

The spat with the IPL is just the latest in a number of confrontations in recent years between news organizations and sporting bodies over access and accreditation rules to major events.

A boycott of the Rugby World Cup in France was narrowly avoided last year after a last-minute deal was agreed to relax stringent restrictions around the online use of pictures and video from matches.

The IPL - which features some of the biggest stars of world cricket - starts on April 18 with the match between Bangalore and Kolkata, two of the eight big city franchises. The final will take place on June 1.

Setanta has secured the British TV rights to live coverage of the 59 matches in a five-year deal.

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