If you can see it and store it in your brain you can also store it digitally and write about it, simple as that.

everyone who tries to tell you otherwise should be shot on sight, don’t go to court, go to war, wave your fist and shout, one solution, revolution

ah and don’t forget to elect pirateparty on your way out.

Their subsidiary, MLBAM (Major League Baseball Advanced Media), which handles all their online content, is a cash cow ($600M in revenue last year). What’s more, it’s the only revenue stream shared equally among the 30 clubs, so as the internet becomes more and more important it stands to reason (if revenue sharing remains unchanged) that MLB will become more and more egaliatarian as a league as revenue streams are redirected online.

Check out MLB.com</a?’s Gameday feature. It’s amazing. To compete with sites offering textual play-by-plays, MLBAM rolled out Gameday which gives a javascript graphical representation of every pitch, live. It’s available free at MLB.com for every game. Gameday also has live graphics that show the location of hits and outs and graphics that show a pitchers average velocity and hot and cold grids for individual batters’ strike zones.

I think the Gaffer has some good points, especially as a foreign fan, about how hard the Premier League makes following their matches. Thankfully, since the Sirius and XM satellite radio merger, I now get EPL radio broadcasts that way.

(ESPN, based in Connecticut, does live textual play-by-play for EPL matches on their Soccernet website. I wonder if they’re paying licensing fees?)

When pagers came out in the 1980s, companies started offering services that would send live score updates to your pager for the major American professional and college sports. The NBA sued these companies on the same grounds that the Premier League is sending cease and desist letters.

The courts in the U.S. ruled that scores, status updates, textual play-by-plays are all considered news and that reporting these events, even live, was protected by the First Amendment (freedom of speech/press).

This court decision was reinforced when MLB recently tried to sue several fantasy baseball services for using the names of players and statistics without paying licensing fees. Once again the courts ruled that these events were still news and still protected by the First Amendment. If Albert Pujols hits a homerun, telling others that Albert Pujols hit a homerun is well within the free public’s rights.

It’s still, obviously, illegal to retransmit or rebroadcast someone else’s specific audio or video feed (Justin.tv, etc).

Without getting into a debate over intellectual property in general (namely that the only reason reproduction/duplication is considered theft is because the expectation for exclusivity has been created through government force and doesn’t exist naturally, as compared to the real physical loss that occurs through material theft), I agree with the U.S. courts and not ThomD.

I fail to see how reporting on events that take place under the public eye is the exclusive right of the Premier League.