We've already discussed how ridiculous it is that any mainstream publication agrees to the NFL's policies that effectively set rules for how they can report on sporting events. How can a publication claim to have journalistic integrity after agreeing to specific rules on what they will and won't report on concerning a news event? On top of that, we've pointed out how ridiculous one particular football team, the Washington Redskins, has become in dealing with fans. Despite having the longest record of continuous sellouts in professional sports, the Redskins have been suing over 100 fans who were unable to pay for their season tickets. The Redskins could have easily just resold the tickets (and, in fact, they are reselling the tickets). But also suing some of the team's biggest fans after they've been hit by the financial crisis? That's just obnoxious.

Lots of fans are pissed off at the Redskins this season, and a local radio station came up with a plan to get fans to wear paper bags over their heads during a recent game -- even going out and handing out a bunch of bags outside the stadium for just that purpose. Of course, gametime came and security confiscated most of the bags, saying that such bags are not allowed in the stadium. Still, Dan Steinberg, who writes the DC Sports Blog for the Washington Post, went around looking for such disgruntled fans. And while he didn't find many with paper bags, he did find other disgruntled fans displaying their... disgruntlement. These included t-shirts that were anti-Dan Snyder (owner of the team) along with some other things. Steinberg took photos of these protesters and posted them to his blog.

But not for long.

The photos soon disappeared, and the photo editor for the Washington Post admitted that the Redskins had called them claiming that taking photos of disgruntled fans was a violation of policy:

"The Redskins said he was in violation of his credentials for taking the photographs. We honored that request, because at the end of the day, they control access to their facility."

First off all, how ridiculous is it that the Redskins are so insanely controlling that it thinks that banning photos of disgruntled fans will suddenly make people not realize that fans are disgruntled?

But, more importantly, what a shame that the Washington Post would simply fold like that. Yes, the Redskins control access to the facilities, but the Washington Post is effectively providing free advertising for the Redskins pretty much every day, by writing articles about them. The Redskins don't want to lose coverage from the Post. If the Washington Post had any journalistic integrity, why wouldn't it stand up to the Redskins and say "hey, disgruntled fans are news, and we're here to report the news." And people wonder why folks don't trust the coverage in their local newspapers any more. Apparently, those newspapers -- even the big "respected" names -- have no problem caving in to ridiculous requests from those they cover.

Meanwhile, The Big Lead (which gets a few of the details of the story mixed up) wonders what would happen if other people took such photos and sent them to the Washington Post to put on its blog, since the Redskins' main complaint is that Steinberg violated his credentials by taking the photos. If others took the photos though...

Remember how the NFL told the press that they weren't allowed to live blog or live Tweet games, as it would be a violation of the league's broadcast rights? I noted that I couldn't see how that was enforceable by the league, other than by kicking reporters out of the stadium. Of course, even that would backfire, because a reporter could just watch the game on TV and live blog. And... in fact... that's exactly what the WSJ just did, apparently thumbing its collective nose at the NFL's restrictions. Ben alerts us to the news that a WSJ reporter, safely on his couch at home, live blogged a recent football game between the NY Jets and the Tennessee Titans. Your move, NFL...

As we've discussed here before, the biggest beneficiaries of sports reporting are probably the teams themselves. The more news & analysis that is published about a team, the more relevant they remain in the public eye -- no stories, and the teams risk falling into oblivion. So, it's interesting to see that the hockey team, Los Angeles Kings, has recently hired its own full time reporter to cover the team. Rich Hammond once covered the Kings for the Los Angeles Daily News, and has been given complete autonomy to post commentary and stories on the Kings' web site, kings.nhl.com. Sure, some are wary of how "impartial" this news will be if the reporter is on the Kings' payroll; but really, that contention really plays a bit moot nowadays. In an era where the audience is no longer beholden to a few media outlets, the supposed guise of impartiality is less important, replaced by the more useful quality of transparency and accountability. If Hammond reports with genuine, well thought-out coverage, then his audience will reward him with their trust and readership, regardless of where his paycheck comes from.

A couple years ago, law professor Wendy Seltzer used the NFL as an example of sports leagues performing copyfraud, by claiming copyright control beyond what is allowed by law. Specifically, she was talking about the warning mentioned at some point during every game. For the NFL it was: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited." In Seltzer's case, amazingly, the NFL sent a DMCA takedown of her posting that clip to YouTube -- giving her another "teachable moment" on copyright abuse.

And yet, sports leagues still continue the copyfraud. One of the fine folks over at Consumerist, Phil Villarreal, found the wording of Major League Baseball's warning quite questionable:

"Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited,"

Unlike the NFL one, at least it didn't say "descriptions," but "account" is pretty close. So, Villarreal contacted MLB to request "express written consent" to provide an "account" of the game he had watched to a friend. To its credit, MLB responded and asked him to call someone in its business development department... who (perhaps reasonably) thought it was a joke and did not provide the written consent (and stopped responding to calls and emails).

Now, obviously, this is a bit of a joke (and a funny one), but it does highlight a rather serious problem. Copyright holders are pretty regularly claiming significantly more rights than they actually hold over content, and many people simply assume that they can do this. This leads to them to think that they don't have basic rights concerning not just "fair use" but stuff that is obviously not covered by copyright, such as an "account of this game." There really should be sanctions against such copyfraud.

The NY Times checked in with its own version of the story about sports leagues restricting what fans can do in the stands to share their experience -- a story that we've already covered. However, Romenesko points us to a little tidbit down at the bottom of the NYT article, talking about other leagues that have tried to do something similar, mentioning that a sports league in Wisconsin went so far as to send invoices to newspapers it felt were "live blogging" its events. We had written about this dispute a few months ago, but I hadn't heard about the invoices before.

Every newspaper who received an invoice smartly ignored it, but the whole concept is ridiculous. The league is claiming that such a live blogging of what's happening at the sports event counts as a "broadcast" and thus should be required to pay the same fees that, say, local radio stations pay to broadcast the events. But the idea that you can stop people from, or charge people for, telling the world what's happening in a sporting venue is preposterous, not just from a legal or technological standpoint, but because these events depend on news coverage for advertising. Attempting to charge newspapers (or fans) for trying to keep others informed seems incredibly self-defeating.

While we have many problems with the way MLB.com conducts itself concerning its attempts to claim ownership of factual information, you can't deny that (separate from that), it's built up a nice business by really focusing on giving fans what they want in terms of online video. While the product has had technical problems, on the whole MLB.com continues to improve it, adding many unique and useful features, such that it's actually well worth purchasing. If you order the package to watch baseball games, it gives you all sorts of neat tools that can't be found elsewhere, and are great for tracking pretty much any game you want. There are still some problems -- including silly blackout zones (so it's tough to watch local teams) and blackout times when games are being shown on national TV, but on the whole MLB.com has done a pretty good job making the service worth buying.

Compare that to the Premier League in the UK. It's been nearly five years since the league first started freaking out about people watching unauthorized streams online. But rather than trying to serve those underserved customers, the Premier League has repeatedly lashed out at anyone who might possibly enable these games to be seen online. For example, it's sued YouTube apparently unaware that the company is protected by the safe harbors of the DMCA, and (if anyone) it should be going after those who actually upload the games. It's also suing Justin.tv in the same misguided fashion.

Amazingly, the league seems proud of the fact that it's going after these companies, rather than the appropriate targets. Jeff T alerts us to an article in the Guardian which is basically a case study in what not to do about these things. It hypes up how the Premier League purposely goes after the platform providers, as if that's a good thing. It also (bizarrely) claims that these anti-fan maneuvers are somehow a different and better response than the way the music industry responded to unauthorized file sharing. But that's not true. While it's not suing fans directly, it's still suing to stop fans from doing what they want to do. It's the same exact mistake.

Rather than recognizing the simple fact that the reason fans watch these streams online is because the Premier League has failed to offer it up themselves, the Premier League seems to relish the fact that it makes it more difficult for fans to see its product. The article talks about the "Saturday blackouts" on video designed to get more fans to go to matches, without recognizing that such blackouts have been shown to be pointless. There used to be rules for baseball in the US that games that weren't sold out wouldn't be shown on TV, but eventually people realized that people weren't watching on TV as a substitute for going to the game, but because they love their favorite team and want to watch them however possible. The more they can watch them on TV, the more interested they are in seeing live games.

Jeff, who sent this story in, makes the point quite clearly, by noting that he watches poor quality streams of Premier League matches in Canada because the League refuses to make most of their matches available to watch online. Rather than going after the companies that run platforms that enable such things, there's a really simple solution: offer high quality online webcasts yourself, and actually serve the fans. But that seems far beyond the Premier League's strategic thinking.

A new study from the UK says that people who listen to soccer matches on the radio while driving behave more erratically and dangerously than non-listeners. Indeed, says one of the researchers, "It is widely accepted that the distraction of talking on a hand-held mobile phone may lead to accidents but other activities may have a similar impact – such as listening to sport on the radio." Since the UK's already banned talking on the phone while driving, will it now push for a ban on listening to sports while driving? After all, if "other activities may have a similar impact", they're all worthy of their own bans, aren't they? Here's a novel idea: instead of creating bans on one single activity after another, just crack down on unsafe driving with existing laws, regardless of the cause.

Last year, we were dismayed that newspapers seemed to be willing to agree to certain rules placed on how they could report on sporting events, as per the National Football League and Major League Baseball. In both cases, these involved significant restrictions on what and how they could report. At the time, we suggested that newspapers stop accepting the restrictions, even if it meant they were no longer granted a press pass -- but every newspaper we know of gave in. Covering baseball and football was just too important -- even though these newspapers could easily still report on games without the benefit of a press pass. You don't need a press pass to report on an event.

That said, while it's on a much smaller scale, it's nice to see the Redding Record Searchlight stop covering the local rodeo over this same issue (found via Romenesko). The rodeo decided that it would only give press passes to those who were "willing to work with us," which meant covering things in a way that was favorable to the rodeo. Good for the Redding Record Searchlight. Hopefully some other newspapers will get up enough courage to tell other (bigger) sports what they can do with their restrictions as well.

We've seen way too many situations where modern technology has shown how ridiculous certain rules and regulations are. The latest involves the NCAA apparently freaking out about students at certain colleges setting up Facebook groups pleading with high-profile high school sports students to attend their universities. According to the NCAA such "recruiting" violates its rules that forbid trying to influence student athletes over which college to attend. Because of this, the NCAA has pushed the universities to reign in students, to the point that NC State sent one of its students a cease-and-desist, threatening "further action" if he didn't take down a Facebook group trying to attract a student athlete. The folks who sent the cease-and-desist admit that it's ridiculous, but they had to do so due to the NCAA pressure. They're hoping that the NCAA will back down on this:

"I think nationally the NCAA needs to address further Facebook and how these groups play a part in recruiting. Is it realistic for us to be able to monitor them? What harm is a group like this causing? But as the legislation stands right now, this is the position we have to take."

Of course, this is the same NCAA that has tried to limit reporters from live-blogging sporting events (though, it's done little to enforce those rules), so it would come as no surprise if it chose to continue down this path.

In the past, sports leagues have tried to claim that transmitting information about their events violated their copyrights, but every time they've tried to enforce that, they've lost (often badly) in court. Despite the exaggerated claims you often hear towards the ends of sporting broadcasts about how "Any use of this broadcast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the league's consent, is prohibited," just because they say it, doesn't make it so -- especially when it comes to "descriptions" of the game.

Of course, this has always made me wonder about the "exclusive contracts" that various sports teams and leagues sign with certain broadcast companies for TV, radio and internet streams. Because, in this day and age, the lines between things start to get blurry really fast. If I'm at a game and using my mobile phone to tell a friend what's happening, am I broadcasting? What if I'm using three way calling so it's more than just one person listening? What if it's 10 people? Now, what if I'm filming the game with my cell phone? These days, there are tons of new services like Qik that allow you to broadcast video directly from your mobile phone. You know there's a lawsuit waiting to happen...

And while it isn't quite as extreme yet, there is a lawsuit happening now that may play into this. Romenesko points us to the news that the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association has sued newspaper giant Gannett for daring to cover its sporting events by including online video of the event. It claims that showing the event infringes "on its exclusive media ownership rights." Specifically, the group is claiming that high school sporting events are not news, and therefore it has the right to "control the transmission, Internet stream, photo, image, film, videotape, audiotape, writing, drawing or other depiction or description" of games.

Already, we know that it's simply not true that they have the right to control "description" of the game, but do they really have the right to any video tape of the event as well? It seems like quite a stretch to claim that a sporting event is not news. Now, if the event is on private property, they could simply ban the ability to film/record the event and throw violators off the property, but that's separate from the "media ownership rights."

The article above, written by the local Gannett-owned newspaper who filed the suit, is a bit misleading, in that most of the article claims it was sued simply for reporting on the game, which is absolutely ridiculous. The reporter doesn't even mention the video streaming until the 10th paragraph. Still, once you realize that a video you film yourself really is just another "depiction" of a news event... you do have to wonder if the sports organizations really can claim ownership over it. Perhaps this lawsuit will let us find out.