Broadcast Law, Malcolm Gladwell Redux, And Naming A Band
Listed in: BaseballI've been researching broadcast law, and, apparently, there is strong precedent protecting sports teams' asserted rights to control audio broadcasts of accounts and descriptions of their games. However, what I don't see in the copyright code, including the Sports Broadcasting Act, is reference to non-live webcast descriptions of non-artistic events. The SBA refers over and over again to "telecasting", which I take to mean television. What I'm getting at is that it might be possible to argue the Pittsburgh decision referenced above does not apply to podcasts describing sporting events under the condition that they are not streamed live, which might be defined as a "broadcast" (in the spirit of fairness, too, live streaming would compete with the live over the air signals of radio stations).
Furthermore, I fail to see how Sportsline.com, which is owned by CBS, which has no broadcast rights to the NBA, is allowed to cover games by posting a complete play-by-play and what they call a "glog" (their term for liveblogging an event) without running afoul of the "accounts and descriptions" doctrine.
Let's say I re-create the situation in Pittsburgh, but with some twists: I watch a baseball game on TV, recording my spoken observations live. Once the game is over, I edit the recording and upload it to iTunes for free download by the masses. I would use no sound or images from the team's radio and television broadcasts of the game; I would create all production elements. There is no way anyone could have listened to me during the game, so, in essence, I'm providing an account and description of the game on the same schedule that newspaper beat writers are on. There might be a legal leg to stand on if I strictly adhere to an "only after the game" policy. If done well, there would be an audience for such broadcasts. God knows, though, said audience is probably pretty small where I live, in San Francisco, where Jon Miller is king.
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After thinking about Blink some more, talking with more and more people, and seeing the response here on Sportszilla, I've come to regard the experiment I described in my last post as less about how well people put together baseball rosters, but, rather, about how people of similar viewpoints and experiences make similar decisions despite their methods of decision-making; I'm choosing to emphasize similarity, rather than difference. Ben, John, and Zach had each done about the same amount of information-gathering and processing before I asked them to make their decisions, and they are all of the same young-educated-male, open to statistical analysis, demographic, so they ended up with similar teams. The difference in the lineups, Mussina and Alou particularly, isn't all that different in light of how other people from vastly different backgrounds chose their teams. In other words, with the same goal, the same information, and the same preparation, John and Zach made the same decisions in a snap that Ben took all evening to arrive at. John and Zach showed that we can make instant decisions if we trust our information. They trust their baseball knowledge, and so their decisions were sound when measured against Ben's decisions.
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I need a name for a band I'm starting. Distortion. Fast. Screams. Harmonies. Sound you haven't heard before. That's the best I can do for a description, since the band technically doesn't exist yet. I've already asked Zach and Ben for band name suggestions. All of them were better than these (the best name, by far, on the Onion's list is Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, and that's saying something). The current front-runner, as suggested by Zach, is Lisa Needs Braces.
