Web developer Ollie Parsley, who this week added MotorTweets to the Twitter services he has been running since February 2009 (FootyTweets, CricketTweets, RugbyTweets), received the email from NetResults, on behalf of DataCo, the company which acts as a copyright watchdog for the FA Premier League, Football League, Scottish Premier League and Scottish Football League.
Parsley was told he should contact Football DataCo to discuss the costs of buying an appropriate licence for using the data, which would cost £5,320 for the Premier League and £10,534 for the Football League - £15,854 for both together per season.
Football DataCo currently uses the Press Association's PA Sport to produce Actim Stats - a collection of team, player and match statistics derived from all the actions that take place during a match.
"We wish to make you aware that we have a good faith belief that your present use is an infringement of the Leagues' legal rights and that all such unauthorised use must cease immediately," Philip Stubbs, from NetResult, informed Parsley in the email.
"The leagues view live game information as being part of their content in the same way as broadcasting and audio - therefore the leagues provide a live data service via the Press Association. Other services providing live updates that are not official are viewed by the leagues as breaching their rights in their content," David Folker, Football DataCo general manager, told Journalism.co.uk.
Parsley responded by removing the logos and replacing them with simple shirt icons, and ceasing to reproduce live match updates, as he explained in a blog post last week.
"A number of people have jumped to the conclusion that I write every match update for FootyTweets. This is incorrect: I crawl around a few other sources and then send them out so they are done automatically. This does take the edge off the fact that some people believe that the Football DataCo would stop people writing match updates of their own," Parsley later told Journalism.co.uk.
Parsley, an independent web developer who runs the sport Twitter services as a part-time hobby, believes that he has not detracted attention from the league teams: "Many followers of FootyTweets' Twitter accounts have contacted me and said that they have visited their team's official website a lot more than before they followed the account.
"The big companies and clubs need to see these benefits of getting news and match updates into the wide world of microblogging and social networking as it clearly adds another ways to distribute their content and engage with their fans."
"The FootyTweets site was showing club crests and league crests. The clubs and leagues own their crests and their use requires the approval of the trademark owner - which we have advised FootyTweets to obtain whereupon they can carry on using the agreed crests," explained Folker.
FootyTweets was providing future fixtures info, he added. "We view the fixtures as being protected by copyright and or database right. FootyTweets have been offered the opportunity to contact me to discuss the costs."
In a confusing twist, Folker was under the false belief that FootyTweets had been bought by BSkyB - an example, he thought, that 'demonstrated the way in which supposed "not-for-profit" fansites and their operators use league content for free to build their profiles and readerships, then either become purely commercial operations or sell themselves to commercial enterprises'.
However, as Parsley has now made clear, his original blog post detailing the BSkyB acquisition was an April fool joke.
Parsley confirmed to Journalism.co.uk that FootyTweets is independently run on a not-for-profit basis.
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