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Twitter screen shots reflecting the suspension of Deadspin and SBNationGif accounts over copyright infringement claims.

As National Football League games unfolded last weekend, millions watched clips of spectacular plays on TV and on social media. But across the Atlantic Ocean, on the screens of a little-known company in London called Net Result, hired hands of the league were not hunting for great highlights but for violators of N.F.L. copyrights.

Using its own software to identify infringing content, along with online searches by staff members, it has filed more than 1,000 notices this season to social media sites such as Twitter demanding the removal of clips that violate the league’s copyright. Many were GIFs—animated images known as a graphics interchange format.Hundreds of videos were flagged last week, said Phil Stubbs, a client service manager for Net Result, which monitors and enforces intellectual property rights. But the breadth of the Internet makes the full extent of the unauthorized use of N.F.L. videos hard if not impossible to know.“I don’t think we’ve found them all,” Stubbs said. “But it’s like when YouTube started — it’s vast — and people love posting them in the social media age.”Continue reading the main storyNet Result’s action, in addition to Ultimate Fighting Championship’s accusation of copyright infringement, led to Twitter’s decision to suspend Deadspin’s account at about 5:30 p.m. Monday, an hour or so after it started to receive notices that Deadspin’s use of the N.F.L. videos had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.The account returned at 7:45 — with a mock announcement from N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell and GIF animations embedded in 18 postings stripped by Twitter, said Tim Marchman, Deadspin’s editor in chief. The suspension of its Twitter account was “absurd,” he said.Net Result, which also operates from Los Angeles and China, is one of a small group of companies that scour the Web for copyright infringers like those who pirate brief snatches of prohibited video content or stream live games. In its relationship with the N.F.L., Net Result provides reports on its work and follows parameters set down by the league.But generally, it has free rein to act against anyone it deems violating the league’s rights.The Deadspin account was not the only one suspended by Twitter on Monday. “Takedown demands” from the Big 12 and Southeastern Conferences over the unauthorized use of video from several football games pushed @SBNationGIF, the GIF-only account of SB Nation’s website, off-line for most of two days. In one of the SEC’s filings, the conference cited a GIF created from the broadcast of the East Carolina-Florida game last month as a violation of its copyright.XOS Digital, a sports technology firm, monitors the online use of the video content for the conferences.“Our game-day enforcement team flagged certain pieces of content across multiple social media platforms as part of normal operational procedures,” said Ben Godwin, a vice president of licensing at XOS.Leagues and conferences are sensitive to their clips or video streams being used without permission if for no other reason than to protect the broadcasters who pay billions of dollars to televise their games. With more video than ever available, they have to balance the need to protect their content against the free promotion they get through the sharing of highlights on popular social media sites.For the N.F.L., there is no doubt about the need to police the Web. Fans are not the target of the league’s effort to enforce its rights, in an expanding video universe where clips are shown on the N.F.L.’s own websites and, through myriad other deals, on sites owned by television networks, and on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Bleacher Report and Yahoo.“We put out a bunch of content for fans to consume and share but if certain people use it for their own commercial use it violates our policy and the D.M.C.A.,” saids Brian Rolapp, the league’s executive vice president for media. “It’s a balance; we want to serve our fans, but there are always some organizations who want to use it illegally.”But Marchman insisted the fair-use doctrine of federal copyright law permits the use of the short clips.“Just because they have video that they intend to make money off it, doesn’t mean we can’t use it,” he said.Bob Bowman, the president of business and media for Major League Baseball, said that until the league reached highlight deals with various websites and social media outlets several years ago, he occasionally turned a blind eye to unauthorized use of video. But he said he now believes that M.L.B. is largely protected because of the amount of authorized video that is available.“Anything momentous is already distributed and available,” he said. “Every now and then, we have a situation where someone has posted an unauthorized video, and we usually swap it for one that we’ve authorized.”The U.F.C.’s method of protecting its video is a more aggressive, a 24/7 approach to guard against websites that post videos of winning fighters before a broadcast is concluded. The organization has had a continuing back-and-forth with Deadspin that prompted the takedown notice that helped lead to the suspension of the Twitter account.“We reached out to them to deliver our guidelines and cooperate, and in some ways they did,” said Clint Cox, vice president of technology for the U.F.C. In other ways, he said, some videos used by Deadspin and other sites owned by Gawker Media served more as spoilers to fans.“In those instances,” Cox said, “we asked Gawker to remove the video, and depending on their response, we said we’d be reaching out to Twitter.”