The European Court of Justice will this week hear a landmark case brought by a Portsmouth-based pub landlord, which could change the landscape of how sports broadcasting rights are sold across Europe.
Five years ago, Karen Murphy would try to draw punters to her Portsmouth pub, The Red, White and Blue, by showing Premier League football matches on the pub TV.
However, she found the monthly subscription to Sky Sports increasingly unaffordable - pubs can pay more than £1,000 a month.
Instead, she found a cheaper means of screening English football - a subscription to a Greek satellite broadcaster, NOVA. This imported satellite card was around one 10th of the cost Karen was paying to BSkyB.
She says she's not the only one saving money in this way:
"I think you'll find that most publicans will try and find another way of showing football. In fact quite a lot of them do.
"I think it's only the larger chains that can afford to pay the Sky prices. A lot of pubs have taken Sky out - they simply can't afford it."
Copyright concern
However, using these foreign subscription cards puts publicans like Ms Murphy in breach of UK copyright law, because the means by which they screen football is not via the authorised broadcaster - Sky Sports.
As a result, Ms Murphy was taken to court and ended up having to pay nearly £8,000 in fines and costs after being caught by enforcers working on behalf of Football Association Premier League Limited (FAPL) - the private company which represents the broadcasting interests of the 20 English Premier League clubs.
Five years on from her first appearance in a magistrates court, she has taken her appeal all the way to the grand chamber of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) - a court reserved only for the most complex and important cases of European law.
"I think it's unjust. I think it's a greedy private company trying to dictate to the small people what they can and cannot do, purely for profit," she told 5 live Investigates.
"The law needs changing. If I don't fight who is going to fight?"
Sitting in her pub, she puts her case into perspective:
"If I wanted to go and buy a car, I could go to any garage I like. Me, as a publican, if I want to show football, I can only go to the Sky garage, and have to pay 10 times the price of anybody else [in Europe]. I don't believe that's fair."
