Ah, copyright; my first legal love. Great story on Ars Technica yesterday about how the NFL's lawyers sent a cease-and-desist to probably the worst possible target: a law professor and staff attorney for EFF.
The NFL, as any football fan knows, is a big fan of telling people that their telecast is copyrighted and that pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game are prohibited if done without the NFL's permission.
Any 1st year law student can tell you the NFL is full of crap. You know, legally speaking. Their broadcast is copyrighted; accounts of a football game are facts and you can't stop someone from giving an account of anything. Same goes for descriptions. If I "describe" the movie 300 on my blog, the producers can't sue me for copyright infringement. Pictures are a bit murkier; if you take a picture at a game, it's probably yours, but the uniforms and logos are all trademarked so you probably can't go around selling it. The NFL is tough that way.
None of this matters to fair use, though, which allows small excerpts of ANY copyrighted material, if done for specific uses (like education; professors of law easily fall into this category).
One of the reasons I've been interested in copyright is because I believe that copyright holders--especially monolithic entities like the NFL, Disney, or Viacom--are almost criminal in their misuse of copyright law to strong-arm content users into stopping what is actually perfectly legal "fair use" of a copyrighted work.
And that's why this is so perfect; I hope that Seltzer (the professor, if you didn't click the link) pushes them all the way to court on this one. My real motive: the NFL stopped using a 4-second clip of Barry Sanders during their copyright spiel, and since he's one of the greatest runningbacks to play the game, I feel their copyright message no longer has any meaning.
No, that doesn't make sense. But it was Barry!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment