Sports leagues are amazing in their ability to try to over protect the content that should be delivering them additional fans. We've recently covered Major League Baseball's continued attempt to convince judges that
it can own facts, while various soccer leagues have been
suing YouTube for helping attract more fans to the sport. The National Football League is stepping out to its own levels of ridiculousness lately as well. In the past, we've covered the NFL's demand that news organizations
only use official video footage of games (wondering if they'll ban cameraphones as well) and also its anger over
churches showing the Super Bowl on a big screen without paying up. Then, of course, the NFL has been overly aggressive in bullying anyone who uses the name of the Super Bowl for anything, and recently tried to
trademark "the Big Game" as well, after many advertisers started using that phrase to avoid running afoul of NFL lawyers over the Super Bowl. The NFL also
abused the DMCA in demanding a law professor take down a clip on YouTube that was clearly fair use and which (amusingly) was being used to show how the NFL asserted certain rights it didn't actually have.
The latest is that the NFL has now expanded its rule for media companies. Not only must they only use officially provided NFL footage rather than their own cameras, they can
only display 45-seconds of game time or players on their own websites -- and if they use any footage at all, it needs to contain a link back to the NFL site. While it's true that the NFL can set conditions for providing media outlets access to a game, they simply cannot dictate how a media organization reports the news. The restrictions say that media organizations can show as much of their own reporters standing in front of a camera as long as (yes, it gets this ridiculous) no NFL players are seen in the background. If the media interviews a player (or players) on its own, it can't include more than 45 total seconds of video coverage. The NFL admits that it's only doing this because it thinks it will get more money from having more people visit its own sites that will host more video clips. This is incredibly short-sighted, of course. The goal of the NFL should be to keep getting more fans, and then there are plenty of ways to make money off those fans without dictating how and where they can see video clips. In the meantime, it's about time that news organizations stood up to the NFL and said that they're going to report the news however they see fit, without restrictions from the league. They might also want to point out that the NFL doesn't get to decide what's "fair use" for their videos. News reporting is a fair use exception, so news organizations should be free to make use of whatever amount of the video they feel is appropriate for reporting on a story, without artificially made up limitations from the league. And, for video created by the organizations themselves, the media should be able to use as much of it as they want.
