Slashdot Mirror
No Social Media In These College Stadiums
RawJoe writes "Today, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is expected to release a final version of its new media policy that, at the moment, can best be described as a ban on all social media usage at SEC games. Earlier this month, the conference informed its schools of the new policy, which says that ticketed fans can't 'produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event.' Translated, that means no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, or any other service that could in any way compete with authorized media coverage of the event. In the case of the SEC, authorized media coverage rights belong to CBS, who has a $3B deal with the conference over the next 15 years, according to The St Petersburg Times." Good luck with that. To quote Clay Shirky, "The idea that people can't capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition."
So in other words, I am not allowed to tweet, "Haha, the Bengals lost again?"
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
As long as everybody at the game just goes ahead and Tweets, it'll be OK. There's no way that the SEC can control thousands of people doing this at will. It will illustrate the ridiculousness of the whole policy.
Using Twitter and Facebook when you're at a game is distracting at best, narcissistic at worst. However, the assumption that they are using to fuel their ban - that personal accounts and expressions are somehow not admissible, that CBS has a monopoly on communication - is dangerous, and should be protested. You can laugh it off and say, "There's no way that this is Constitutional," but you should stand up for your rights. As lame as it may sound, they should organize a huge Twitter contingent to post at the same time, and see if they can get kicked out. That would show people how out of touch the SEC is, and that people's rights cannot be signed away, with OR without their consent.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Wow, what idiot decided to do that? Signing away broadcast rights for 15 years for a measly 3 billion? That's 200 million a year, that really is not that much money.
Who knows what kind of tech we will get in those 15 years? It's going to be very difficult to control that over the long term.
That's nice. I'm releasing a new policy that anyone who says my name 3 times has to send me a $100 check.
So what if they release a policy? It's not like they have any sort of legal standing to enforce it. What are they going to do, stop selling you tickets?
Since schools are disseminators of knowledge, this policy to ban knowledge/information attacks the entire institution of education. What network TV has to do with the educational process beyond Cable In The Classroom is beyond understanding. Clearly these policies will need to change or colleges will no longer be an effective means of higher education.
As a longtime Gator I'm trying to imagine what kind of hell trying to police this will be. And that is from the prospective of being a Gator being that UF is pretty damn uptight when it comes to how they expect us to act at our home sporting events. Never freaking mind what happens at Ol'Miss or UT games.
Yeah, good luck with that SEC.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Hope this sucks the money out of college sports so the schools go back to teaching.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I WAS an SEC football fan. I'm not whether I'm allowed to be now. Can I not discuss the game with friends the next day now? Fuck that.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
There is another social medium, without which the whole event's existence can't even be proven: Good old fashioned direct human-to-human communication.
In other words: Does this contract rule (as opposed to a law) forbid people to memorize it and then tell it to other people (e.g. by talking to someone later)?
How would they expect to enforce or even check this? They can't control it. They would have to delete the memory inside the brain every time someone steps outside.
So if people can tell someone, then that other person can put in on a social medium site, because he/she never had a contract or anything with the SEC.
Which makes the rule pointless and by definition ineffective.
They have to face the fact, that the time of exclusive "big media" broadcast rights is over. Besides: Who watches it on "big media" anyway nowadays? I have no TV for nearly a decade now, and many friends of mine don't have one either. Or they only switch it on, to zap for some time, find that nothing is on, and switch it off again.
Is TV still that big in the USA? (Germany here.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's times like this I wished I watched sports so I could boycott them. Oh well, guess I will continue not caring.
Be careful mate.
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didnâ(TM)t speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Well, in a way, they are. What I'm trying to say is that they couldn't care less if you tweet to your friends or post to Facebook.
What they ARE interested in is controlling coverage of the game that competes with that of CBS. If you happen to be working for a newspaper, Web site, TV station, blog, or podcast that hasn't been blessed by CBS and/or the SEC, they're gunning for you. After all, you might do something crazy like publish real-time coverage of a game, a frequently-updated scoreboard, or, heaven forbid, you might interview a player. Want a video clip to use? Pay up. Want to post that footage you got of a player sucker-punching an official? Not unless you get approval. Want to do anything that CBS or the SEC doesn't want you to do? They'll show you the exit and place a boot in your ass at no extra charge.
If you want to really piss off the SEC, forget a mass tweet protest. No, start an unauthorized Web site providing coverage of SEC events, and make it better than what the SEC and CBS offer. That'll get their attention in a big way.
It seems the ban applies to the press (ie. the media) that are covering the game. Those people actually are entering into a legally binding contract when they enter the stadium and begin covering the game. Much needed clarification is given by a Nashville Is Talking article with updates, their producer did what Slashdot should have done about 7 hours ago and actually read the f'in policy. Here is the actual Southeastern Conference Media Credentials EULA thinger.
I text "x just won!" A red light comes on in an operations room at the NSA. The operator verifies that it's illegal information. He looks up my cell number in a police database and forwards my name and number to the SEC quick response team. They search their ticket order database for credit card payment information corresponding to my name. There are 2 Brian Gordons at the game, so a technician dashes down to the video surveillance command. He hunches over an open workstation at the back of the room and calls up seating plans for the stadium and the camera coverage layout. He brings up a still frame from the correct camera. He can't tell exactly what he's looking at so he opens a 3D model of the stadium, counts off the seats to find my seat number, and zooms out toward the camera's position. He switches between the still frame window and the 3D model window until they match up perfectly. He registers a video stream from the video processing cluster since it hasn't been offloaded to storage yet. He connects to the stream, seeing a live feed from that camera. He sshes into the cluster and with a few quick commands to the stream server navigates to the exact time of the text. He zooms in, but my seat is too far from the camera to get a clear image. He has an idea- he'll try to see if the TV cameras passed over that section. He sshes into the producer's control workstation and downloads the XML cache of the camera location control software. The archive was never closed for writing so it's corrupt but WinRAR extracts most of the control commands. He filtered out every command except those 10 seconds around the call. There were about 100 files. He opened them all, and went through one by one. 11 files in, he finds a camera whose origin position and origin angle look down on E section. The HD stream hasn't been encoded for storage yet so he dumps the raw data for that camera, for that 1-minute interval around the call. At around 70MB per frame, it takes a few minutes to become available on the stream server. He streams it, manually seeks until it swings into the proper angle, and zooms in tightly on my seat. Sure enough, I'm texting. So it's definitely that Brian Gordon. He dashes back up to the quick response center and quickly opens a security ticket, assigning the E section attendants and marking it Immediate Alert so it will send them a text. They get the alert, containing my seat number. They spot me.
"Excuse me sir, please come with us."
Dude, its a freaking sporting event. Comparing not letting people use Twitter from inside the event to Nazis killing people is like an archetypal example of Godwin's Law. In this case we have a group trying to enforce a (stupid) restriction which anyone is free to simply ignore by not buying tickets or going to the games. This isn't the same as a regime systematically killing people. No, for that matter, does your comparison work at a deeper level. The people in a position to "speak up" are the people who go to games normally but don't care about this restriction personally. Someone who isn't at the games (correctly) has no part in it. They can point and laugh. But I doubt that will influence the SEC.
To add another Shirky quote...
"The loss of control you fear is already in the past."
Whoever keeps making these rules really doesn't get it I guess. Making rules, valid legally or not, that fly in the face of what people almost unconsciously expect just erodes the respect of legitimate law. So thanks a lot for further degrading respect for rules of any kind.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started