The Football Association, Premier League rightsholders BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) and Setanta have used legal threats to have San Francisco-based lifecasting site Justin.tv remove soccer matches its users were streaming “illegally” for free. The trio grumbled (via NOTW) the site - more commonly used by people broadcasting video of their lives to peers - lets users rebroadcast matches like last week’s between Manchester United versus West Ham (supposedly watched 167,138 times) and England’s September World Cup qualifier against Croatia, to which Setanta had exclusive rights.

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Premier League rights, which come up for auction again in April 2009, are not cheap: Sky spent £1.3 billion and Setanta £392 million to show live games until 2010 while the BBC shelled out £172 million for its Match Of The Day highlights programmes. The Premiership is already suing YouTube for copyright and in February won the High Court battle to stop three sites, FreePremierLeague.com, FootballOn.net and PremiershipLive.net, from streaming live matches.

But lifecasting presents a tricky new problem - users can pirate a live match simply by pointing their webcam at the TV. During last Sunday’s Liverpool-Chelsea match, Justin.tv viewers could supposedly choose from eight live streams, mostly from TV channels outside England - one came from a user re-streaming South African channel Super Sport’s feed, which drew 19,081 live views.

It’s just growing pains for the emerging lifecasting crowd, which also includes Ustream.tv and Kyte.tv, but threatens to ride roughshod over the £625 million the Premier League reaps from selling rights to foreign broadcasters. Setanta Sports marketing director Timothy Ryan (via NOTW): “As rights holders we believe what Justin.tv is doing amounts to piracy. It contravenes the owners’ rights which has implications for us.”

A trawl of the site today revealed that the site’s Premier League and England international videos have been removed or are no longer available, though several videos of Setanta’s Scottish Premier League coverage remained. Justin.tv told paidContent:UK today that the site did not comment on individual takedown requests: “Justin.tv has grown from a place where one guy broadcasted his life, to a place where people all over the world broadcast and watch millions of live videos. Justin.tv is 100 percent DMCA-compliant and we promptly respond to all DMCA takedown requests.”