Techdirt. Stories about "mlb.com" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories about "mlb.com"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Fri, 4 Sep 2009 19:30:00 PDT MLB Refuses To Give Permission To Guy To Describe Game To A Friend Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090904/0304256103.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090904/0304256103.shtml 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.

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]]> expressed-written-permission http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090904/0304256103 Tue, 9 Jun 2009 20:12:00 PDT Finally, A MLB Team Gets A Deal For In-Market Online Streaming Carlo Longino http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090608/1124015166.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090608/1124015166.shtml patented a way to black out local users from online streams, an absurd show of pride in something that basically just frustrates fans and customers. But there may be some cracks appearing in the local online blackouts, as the New York Yankees, Cablevision and MLB have reached a deal for in-market streaming of games. At first glance, the negotiations sound pretty convoluted, especially considering the Yankees own a stake in YES, the local TV rightsholder. But not surprisingly, the result -- that people in the Yankees' local market can only buy the online subscription if they're Cablevision subscribers that get the YES network in their cable package -- seems like it's par for the course for MLB, which has a penchant for trying to lock down everything baseball-related online.

The amount of baseball that's broadcast on TV has boomed over the past couple of decades, having escaped the thinking that making the game harder for fans to follow on TV was somehow actually good for it. Now, the same thing is playing out online, where MLB seems hellbent on frustrating fans who want to see all of their teams' games online. What makes online different than TV, in that putting up these walls in front of the game's most dedicated fans is somehow a good thing?

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]]> water-stone-etc. http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090608/1124015166 Tue, 19 May 2009 06:51:00 PDT MLB Gets A Patent On Making It More Difficult To Watch Your Favorite Baseball Team Online Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090517/1347314913.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090517/1347314913.shtml more tools to watch games however they want, they seem to think that fans can be forced to watch in the method MLB wants. However, now MLB.com has taken it even further. It's patented its method for determining who to block out.

You can check out the full patent yourself to see if you can figure out how this was granted. If you asked any half-way competent programmer how to set up such a system, they could all come up with something identical to this. How is this possibly not obvious? Determining where an internet user is geographically has been around for ages. Limiting access by subscription levels has been around forever. Combining the two hardly seems new and innovative. This seems like it should fail based on general obviousness, as well as the new tests under the KSR ruling (on obviousness) and the Bilski ruling (on pure software patents). About the only "good" that comes of this is that perhaps it means other sports leagues won't use such an anti-fan policy.

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