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Baseball Cracks Down on Fan Sites
serutan writes: "Looks like Major League Baseball has joined other players in the big-media content industry to crack down on fans who overstep their proper place as consumers. Anybody with a website dedicated to America's favorite pastime better read this story on Yahoo."
You really would think that baseball, of all sports, could do with some good publicity, what with all the strikes going on. Shooting yourself in the foot all the time will only drive away those casual fans, and hence revenue. Deary, deary me.
...is that the site owners who were hassled were trying to make money from their sites.
I don't think *any* corporation has a problem with fan sites that are put together as a resource or community for their subject matter. Most of them are even generous about letting them use their IP.
What becomes an issue is when the owners of those sites decide to try and use their position for their own gain - for example, selling unauthorized merchandise, as at least one of the people quoted in the article did.
This is simply the difference between running a Star Trek fan site and using your site to sell bootleg CDRs of the episodes. Even if you're just covering the cost of hosting, it's still a crime, and naive to think that any copyright holder will allow it.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The NFL is one of the few major businesses which has a modicum of sense. Consider this quote:
What the NFL realizes is that fan sites are good: they are free promotion (I know a few people who ran a Scottish Claymores fansite. When the club decided to do a new official site, they hired them to do it), and the people who run and read those sites are the hardcore fans, who either shell out hundreds of dollars a year for season tickets or who subscribe to the NFL Sunday Ticket.
Yet again baseball shoots itself in the foot, thanks to a management that has been slow to adapt to any change over the past 80 years. For instance, as late as 1930, none of the three New York teams allowed radio coverage of the games for fear that it would cut into the gate. It wasn't until the 70's that baseball teams began allowing televising of all games.
Exactly. I have a real problem with a sport in which there is no time limit.
I was flipping over to espn to catch sports center yesterday, to see some college football scores and comments. You know what I got? 30 minutes of baseball, then I turned it off. It's so stupid - major league baseball gets so much airtime, and no one cares. If you watch highlights reels from the game, you notice that whenever someone hits a homerun, there's never anyone in the stands to catch it. I mean, these are premium seats, and the 3 people in the section are all scrambling over the chairs to get to the ball.
And they keep demanding more money. Tickets for baseball are *so* expensive, like $50. And these greedy fucks they call players want more. Well, I'll tell you how to get more. Make the game interesting, get more people into the stands. I was actually pissed off that you people didn't go on strike - Friday was a sad day. Strike = less TV converage.
Eventually we will abandon the all american past time in favor of someone else's past time that doesn't suck. I mean, think, baseball's only been here for ~100 years, mabey theres something about soccer that keeps it around for everyone else. Mabey we should check it out.
~Will
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American football has maybe a fifth of that and its TV ratings are constantly on top. Not to mention it almost always packs 50,000-seat stadiums to capacity, even if tickets are $50 (or in many cases much more).
A shorter regular season would make everything worthwhile. No more 30 minutes of highlights on the 11 'oclock news. No more sparsely populated million dollar stadiums (which, urgh, my tax dollars paid for). It would make the game far more exciting, for every game counts tenfold. Teams wouldn't be able to say, "Too bad we lost...oh well we have another 80 games to make it up..."
Dys.
This comment is brought to you by the drug caffiene, and the number 5.
I guess Japan is part of America then? And Canada, and Cuba, and Central America.
Or Cuba? Or Mexico? Or the Dominican Republic? Europeans might be surprised by the number of Major League players who weren't born in the US. Nowadays on a team like the US Dodgers you'll hear Japanese, Spanish and American English being spoken.
Personally, I was hoping the overpaid jerks would strike. After they took their money and went home before the All "Star" game was over, I haven't paid any attention to the "sport." MLB's attitude seems to be that the fans are stupid enough to take whatever they dish out. The fact that the ballparks are still filled and televised games are getting ratings proves they're right. Jumping on fan websites just shows once again that they're only in it for the money, and the fans can go screw themselves as long as they'll stay stupid enough to shell out the bucks.