EPL Talk has seen the future of Premier League highlights on the Internet and it may be legal.

If you missed it, The Daily Telegraph has recently started including highlights of matches on their website. But they’re not just normal highlights. Instead, they’re 3D animated representations of key moments in matches. View a sample from the Arsenal against Liverpool match in the Champions League with superb commentary from Alan Smith.

The different leagues around the world, notably UEFA and the Premier League, shouldn’t be able to copyright the graphical representation of what happens on the pitch. It’s not actual video after all.

Last year an important precedent was set when cricket website CricInfo showed 3D representations of cricket matches online and believed it was avoiding copyright infringement. CricInfo was bought by ESPN last summer.

Despite the Premier League being the most popular sports league in the world, the options available to provide goal highlights in near real-time via the Internet are embarrassingly poor. As a result, the experience for soccer fans is a hodge-podge of different services — some legal, some not — that leaves much to be desired. For a comprehensive listing of options available via the Internet, read EPL Talk’s guide to following the Premier League online.

With The Daily Telegraph’s 3D representations from matches, the newspaper offers fantastic quality of animation that rivals video games. The question is how expensive and how much time it takes to develop the animations. If there’s an opportunity to produce the animations quickly and inexpensively, we could be seeing more of this type of technology in the future from the Telegraph and other news sources online.