Sorry, English Premier League fans. No more posting videos, photographs or GIFs of goals online.

The Premier League has come out saying it aims to squash out the illegal posting of copyrighted footage online.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it. But ultimately it is against the law," Premier League Director of Communications Dan Johnson told BBC's Newsbeat.

"It's a breach of copyright, and we would discourage fans from doing it. We're developing technologies like GIF crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity. I know it sounds as if we're killjoys, but we have to protect our intellectual property."

The Sun and The Times own the online rights to the Premier League and attempt to post goals online within two minutes of the back of the net.

"It's important to underline that it's illegal to do this. We've obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it. We've got legal teams talking with them about what we can do," said Dean Scoggin, deputy head of publishing at The Sun.

It's unclear how effective such a program would be, although, according to The Washington Post, other GIF creators have said they have received cease-and-desist letters from sports leagues before.

"If it is just you or I on a Saturday afternoon doing it every now and again, I think the tactic there would be to inform Twitter or Vine and get it taken down on an isolated basis," Adam Rendle, a copyright law specialist at Taylor Wessing, told The Guardian. "If there are serial 'viners' who are setting up accounts to repeatedly do this every time there is a high-profile match and they have got thousands of followers so it's becoming an unofficial service of goals, they might seek to get the account blocked."

Still, the efforts don't look like they will discourage many.

"If I'm able to watch it, I'm able to GIF it," Justin Russo, famed World Cup GIF-er told The Washington Post. "I guess it's just weird. ... To me it's public information, and it's a public feed."

Twitter, which operates Vine, said it will cooperate with the Premier League's efforts.

"Vine users may not post content that violates the rights of a third party," the company said.