SYDNEY — Australian media group News Ltd. says a push by sports organizations to restrict reporting of their events is an attempt to monopolize coverage, and allowing that by legislation would be an assault on free speech.

Australia's leading sporting bodies have told a Senate inquiry that the advent of online "news" reporting is affecting their revenue streams and could limit their ability to support grassroots participation.

An increasingly intense dispute has evolved between the media as it has embraced digital delivery of news via Internet and mobile platforms and sports organizers, who want the right to license in the digital media what is published beyond strictly breaking news.

Cricket Australia, the Australian Football League and Tennis Australia are among the administrators who appeared before the Australian Senate inquiry calling for the government to create laws or regulations to put limits on what media organizations can publish, from their events, on the Internet.

Cricket Australia locked News Ltd. journalists and photographers and international news agencies out of the first day of a cricket test in 2007 after the groups failed to agree on coverage terms.

"The actions of Cricket Australia in that negotiation was to seek to mine through individual pages of newspapers and decree what we could or could not publish ... under the guise of news," News Ltd. Group editorial director Campbell Reid told the inquiry Thursday.

Reid said News Ltd.'s view was that sports organizations should not "be seeking at this time of unprecedented change in the information world to apply what we regard as a 1950s definition of news. Any attempt to put a stake in the sand at this instant, and say this is a definition (of news) and this is a set of rules, is antiquated."

News Ltd. said it opposed any legislative change, saying it preferred negotiation as a way of resolving differences.

"There is an effective, enforceable regime for dealing with breaches (under the Copyright Act)," Reid said. "It is not the role of parliament to intervene and create new regulation."

David Tomlin, The Associated Press' associate general counsel, told the inquiry on Wednesday in Canberra that sports leagues and organizers were entering the publishing arena with their own web sites and digital deals and competing for advertising and other revenue.

"Sports entities will be able in the long run to take over the reporting of the history of their sports and no one can be entrusted to tell their entire history by themselves," Tomlin said via telephone link from the United States. "Their right to tell their story is the same as ours (the media) and all of us ought to have access equally."

Under existing conditions, news organizations or journalists own copyright of images and words they produce at matches. Increasingly, leagues are asserting that they should own copyright or intellectual property rights to photographic images that occur within the venues they control — the contests themselves.

Sports administrators are asking the Australian government to legislate or set guidelines on the "fair use" exemption in the Copyright Act, which enshrines media access for the purpose of gathering and providing news.

Protracted negotiations between Cricket Australia and the major international news agencies, including The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse, failed to solve an impasse last season over terms and conditions for accreditation.

The international news agencies were unable to cover Australia's home series against New Zealand and South Africa after refusing to accept terms that restricted the number of photographs and stories published per hour and would have given Cricket Australia the right to veto publication to certain Web sites.

That followed disputes at the Rugby World Cup in 2007, which were only resolved when the French government put pressure on organizers to back down from restrictive terms, and leading into the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany.