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Will Your Super Bowl Party Anger the Copyright Gods?
garg0yle writes "According to some folks, watching the Super Bowl on a television bigger than 55 inches is illegal. Is this true? Yes and no — long story short, if you're in a private residence you're probably okay, but if you're running a sports bar you may technically have to negotiate a license with the NFL. Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."
A better choice, for a myriad of reasons, is to not vote for an incumbent this November.
I can dream.
This is news for nerds, remember?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We won't be watching. On any TV.
I do know that a couple of years ago, media organizations stopped referring to events they were sponsoring as "Super Bowl Random Event" but instead started to refer to them as "Big Game Random Event". Frequently they would make a point about not being able to use Super Bowl to refer to the event because of licensing issues with the NFL. At the time I thought that the NFL was shooting themselves in the foot. What makes the Super Bowl such a big money maker for them is its cultural ubiquity in the U.S.. If there are not a lot of events planned around the game, people will pay less attention to the game. If too many of the events planned around the game are "Big Game" events rather than "Super Bowl" events, it will diminish the value of the words "Super Bowl".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Indeed. It isn't first time that /. submitters and editors have made that mistake. Or the second. Or the third... In fact, I am pretty sure that ScuttleMonkey has done this before, several times.
On one hand, I am inclined to think that this is editors' inside joke. You know, repeating that error and watching how many people begin complaining about that isntead of discussing the subject. On the other hand, /. summaries concerning intellectual property are hilariously wrong more often than not (Especially when it comes to patents. As a rule of thumb, the thing being patented is certainly not what /. summary claims it to be, which is just a summary of someone's misinterpration of the abstract) so I can't tell for sure.
Face it, the NFL are brilliant. They are not about football. They are about revenue. They had two goals in mind when setting out on their broadcasting endeavor:
a) Sell high-cost adspace
b) Get people to care about the adspace
Now you hear people always saying "I watch the superbowl for the commercials!" Mission A-Ccomplished NFL. Was that enough? It's never enough. So the last 10 years have been their attempt to make more money by becoming some of the biggest douchebags in the IP industry.
"That's the thing about greed, Arch, it's blind. And it doesn't know when to stop" -- Lenny Cole
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
To be fair, it does make sense for NFL. The summary is little bit bad worded, but you are perfectly fine to watch it at home with friends, on any size TV, as long as isn't considered public place like a sports bar, church or workplace and you do not explicitly charge for viewing the game. You can however ask for compensation on foods and drinks.
I don't think it's that hard to see what is considered a home and a public gathering place. It's not that stupid for NFL (or any other sports league or movie studio) to ask for compensation if their content is being shown on a public place to many people and they're profiting from it.
Honestly, who gives a shit? The simple solution is stop supporting some industry that will try to sue you for being a patron.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I'll let him call me wife if his son gets to soup my bowl at the party
Don't they make their money off commercials? Why should someone have to pay for having people over to watch those commercials? I think sports bars are much less likely to change channels during commercials to catch 3 minutes of Family Guy, so their advertisements will be more effective than in many private homes.
I think a reasonable arrangement would be if you had to report it to the NFL, saying "I'll be having an NFL party in a bar that can have 80 people inside", so the NFL can use those numbers to get more money from their advertisers. If anything, they should be paying YOU.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
I hope so.
The HDMI handshaking makes the audio drop intermittently on my new TV when combined with my new HD PVR from my cable company. Pirated content plays flawlessly over the same HDMI connections.
On the upside, it is going to save me a ton of cash, since all I'll have to buy is a bigger HDD for my Linux box and a media player.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
You've got to be kidding me!
You pay your cable bill and you watch the advertisements, don't you?
If I want to have people over and charge them to watch my TV, its not the NFL's business. Now, if the NFL wants to buy me a TV and a house to watch the Superbowl©, then I'll let them restrict who may enter my home, and at what price.
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
As for sports bars, they're a business encouraging a large number of willing viewers to watch someone else's advertising revenue supported content. Of course they should be compensated.
There. Fixed that for ya.
I don't know, this one might strike people as weird, but I'm not so sure.
If you had the idea to start up a $1 movie theater for profit, it sure would be nice if you could buy a $30 blu-ray version of a recent movie and show it to hundreds of people, but I don't see it as some huge injustice that this isn't legal. There really is a difference between watching something in your home, with friends, etc and a for-profit public performance. (And you can bet that the lawyers would be all over a theater that tried to pull something like that).
No surprise that the NFL would expect the same laws to apply. It would be nice for Congress to pass an exemption for churches and such, though you might risk having people join the Church of the Celluloid and taking unfair advantage.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
The NFL takes the farce of "intellectual property" to such absurd levels that even congressmen might be able to see the lack of clothing.
It is impossible for a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.
A congressman gets money (and hence livelihood) from corporations like the NFL, so there's no way in hell they'll see it as anything other than truth and honesty.
No. Really. Obama wasted a god damn year, trying to appease the republicans to get one republican vote on anything. He failed. The last thing you can accuse him of is being partisan. An unrealistic optimist? sure. A liar? sure, he is a politician after all. A failure? Absolutely.
His greatest failure was in trying to be bi-partisan.
Not the point. The Superbowl is free, but PPV fights are not, and can run a lot of money. If I were to host a fight, Splitting $100 fight over 5 people is better than paying it myself.
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Aye, there's the rub. I haven't licensed a darned thing from the NFL, ever. We need to entirely do away with BS "licensing" like "by viewing this web site...". No, sorry, I agree to your terms by signing a contract, period. I don't agree to your terms by viewing a web site, watching a TV, rubbing my nose, or yelling Yabba Dabba Do. The very notion that I agreed to 34 pages of legalese by doing something no sane person would construe as a positive affirmation of agreement is ridiculous.
Can we please get law back in line with common sense now?
It is not bi-partisan to say "vote for my stuff without any changes."
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Except in my case. All my reps suck. One republican congressman, one republican senator, one democratic senator... all corporate sycophants.
[rant]
Instead of passively witnessing multimillionaire drug addicts chase a ball to sell ad space... do something. Take the people who were going to show up for "da big game" outside to play tag football. Have a foosball championship. Play card games. Have a LAN party. Play DnD. Do something.
The outcome of the game will be the same whether you watch it or not.
Whatever teams are playing this year are branches of a company. Do you care which 7-11 sold the most hotdogs? Or if the Pepsi bottling plant on the east coast produced more soda than the west coast plant? Even if it is your home team, the players aren't from your town. They're employees shuffled around or chasing contracts. At least the local high school games have some attachment to you.
Go ahead and mod me troll or flambait if i've hurt your feelings and doing something to me will make you feel better about how you've spent your Sundays. Just take a moment to consider *doing* something instead of watching others. And if the team you cheered for won... don't say "we won". If you didn't leave a drop of blood or sweat on the field... you were not a part of that victory. You're a witness, that's it. Watching something someone else did is not an accomplishment and no reason to be proud. The team won. You watched.
[/rant]
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
These things end the same every time and rarely have any kind of interesting twist.
In fact, they're composed of smaller units which are similar to the larger. This Menger Sponge of entertainment can claim an average of only 17 minutes of actual action in an event that ostensibly takes one hour yet occupies an entire afternoon to stage.
It's the ultimate in mass-produced manufactured entertainment. I can't understand why it's still so popular.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I don't think it's nearly as absurd as RIAA shenanigans. It really boils down to the argument over whether or not a game of football can be copyrighted. Certainly, the commentary should be, but that's the network's, not the NFLs. The game itself? I don't think so, but I'm not an expert. If you allow that the game footage is the copyright of the NFL, then their behavior (in this instance) is reasonable, or at least, follows a reasonable interpretation of existing laws (even if you might view said laws themselves as unreasonable). Copyright has a concept of "public performances", which are the exclusive right of the copyright holder. Historically, this has been quite important. Say you're a playwright. You mail out your play to producers, hoping one of them picks it up. Now, without the exclusive right to public performances, that producer could take the four copies you mailed him, and the dozen you slipped under his door and into his mail box and under his windshield wipers, hand them out to actors, and put the play on without paying the author a dime. In terms of encouraging playwrights to write, this is quite the undesirable outcome!
On the other hand, perhaps interpreting showing a TV program or movie as a "public performance" in the same sense that putting on a play is, is taking it too far. I suppose just putting a DVD in a machine is easier than putting together a play from a script, so it may make sense to treat it as at least as bad. But alternately, the purpose of the manuscript is to be put on, and earn the writer money from that performance. The purpose of a DVD is to be sold and watched, and it was sold and now you and some other people are watching it, so perhaps it's not really the same thing at all. After all, if it's legal to buy a DVD, then rent it to 10 people for $1 each, it should be equally legal to show it to 10 people in your living room for $1 each. And yes, though the studios want it changed very badly, rental is explicitly allowed under the doctrine of first sale, being a temporary change of possession, not a public performance.
The only way to fix this perceived imbalance, without breaking other things, would be to do away with public performance rights as a special case. I think writers would still be just as protected, as long as you establish concretely that any movie/play/whatever based on a script is categorically a derivative work, and therefore a copyright violation if not properly licensed. But on the other hand, if you own a DVD, you can play it, period. This, however, requires new laws. Without new laws, the NFL's policy is in line with the law. They're even somewhat fair about it, in the sense that sports bars do not have to pay to have TVs in them, unless they are so large as to be considered the primary attraction of the bar, rather than simply a bonus.
Either way, TFA is just FUD. If you aren't a public performance, you can't run afoul of copyright law. No matter how many buddies you invite over, and no matter that you charge them for your beer, it's not a public performance, because it's a private showing still. The nonsense about "you can't call it a Super Bowl party because that's trademarked" is quite stupid, but no more stupid than any other corporation going overboard defending their trademarks. Intel suing prison programs because they use "inside" to refer to those in prison, and Intel owns "Noun Inside"? I'd say the Super Bowl BS is demonstrably less retarded, as at least these parties are actually using the trademarked term, even if using a trademark to refer to the actual trademarked item is supposed to be allowed!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
You have a point, and splitting the cost like that is actually allowed where I live (as long as its happening at ones home) But if you have a bar and ask people to pay to see that match, it's a different business.
I quickly looked over the prices for cable channels (don't have PPV events here), and the prices per channel are
20 euros for home,
45 euros for public places like malls (people can walk in freely),
13 euros for workplaces, schools and such.
For public places that cost to walk in, like bars/restaurants, the equivalent prices are
49 euros for max 80 customers
79 euros for max 160 customers
99 euros for >160 customers
(and yes you need to keep count of the customers because of fire regulations and such too).
Not so overly priced, and you're using other peoples entertainment content to create a nicer place, which in turn creates you income.
A year of Pelosi and Reid blocking any Republican bill from the floor is "nonpartisan"? Including blocking THREE Republican health-care bills from discussion while lying their asses off claiming the Republicans were "not offering alternatives"???
This is a rather too often repeated bit of misinformation. The reality is that the fundamental difference between Republican "alternatives" and the health care bills proposed by democrats is that these alternatives were simply bills related to health care (not comprehensive health care alternatives), covered entirely or by one or more of the existing democratic bills. Thus, the functional proposal Republicans were making was: don't do that or, at best, don't do all of that.
There's nothing wrong with thinking we don't need to overhaul the health care system in the U.S. (I think it demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the math involved, since there's no way that the current levels of spending are maintainable, but it's a valid opinion). What's not valid is claiming that there's anything disingenuous in pointing out that these aren't actually alternatives so much as an oft-reiterated "no."
Depending whether you think movies with multi-million dollar production are good or a load of steaming shit really colors one's perspective on this question. Not that I don't see the difference between public and private viewing of video; it's just that I think the distinction matters far less to those who don't have an artificially strong control over their market. And for something like the Super Bowl, which nearly everyone watches, it's absurd to have laws that prohibit you setting up a screen bigger than 55" in a public bar without compensating the NFL (or whoever). How are they losing money, or control over their IP, between me watching a 54" screen in a bar, or a 55" screen? That inch means nothing to them, and it is only greed that would motivate them to attempt to rain this practice in.
But that's not what happened. They put in strong bills. Then the Republicans balk. So the Dems soften them, and again and again, then put them up for a vote that doesn't get a Republican vote. They should have put up a strong bill, made it stronger, and told the Republicans to fuck themselves.
Again, the Dems get power, and waste it. At least that's better than the Republicans, who get power and use it...
Learn to love Alaska
I honestly will gladly allow them to copyright the hell out of it IF they play in arenas that were not built by any public funds. Otherwise everything NFL must be Public domain.
You want to be careful with that sort of restriction. In the interest of fairness, everything that you produce should be in the public domain as well -- unless you've never used electricity from a utility company which received public grants or subsidies for construction, you've never used public roads, public transportation, or public sidewalks to get to work, and you've never used the United States Postal Service.
Your work is subsidized in many ways by government funds, some subtle, some conspicuous. Principled stands can have some very surprising consequences.
~Idarubicin
If I'm running a party at my house and asking people to chip in to help pay for snacks and beer, how am I detracting from the NFL's profits?
You aren't detracting from their profits. They just want some of your profits.
It is their attempt to expand their ownership of copyright. It would be no different than a painter charging you for publicly displaying his work that you already paid for.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The event is broadcast over the air (almost) everywhere in the US. Anyone can watch it if they have a TV and an antenna. The NFL gets paid from advertisers, not viewers. It's really not clear why someone should be punished for making a public broadcast publicly viewable. One could even argue that superbowl parties increase the number of viewers (it's more fun in a crowd), and in fact each person who watches makes the advertising that much more valuable. You really can't put you "content" out there publicly (over the air) and then bitch about who sees it where.
I thought this was fairly obvious, but "need" meaning that if we want these art forms to survive in the modern high-quality, high-production values state, somehow the expensive equipment, labor, and training need to be paid for.
Yes, I think it's a bad thing if this goes away. I think we benefit not only from having art and entertainment, available, but from having high quality art and entertainment available. Independent of whether this means we need homogenous, national or world-scale products, it's in everyone's interest if it's feasible to support oneself through the production of art in its various forms. Further, in the case of TV and movies, this can go beyond art, to include news, philosophy, educational materials, etc. There is a real problem that revenue sources that have traditionally supported, e.g., news-gatherers and aggregators are drying up, and it's not at all obvious who is going to replace those and how they'll be funded.
It's completely fair, and I encourage everyone, to question whether copyright (and patent) laws are sensible and lead to sensible outcomes. However, you need to do a real educated analysis, and go beyond knee-jerk handwaving and really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products. Revolutions can be good and necessary, but a lot of them leave things worse off than they found them, so it behooves us all to be careful, thoughtful, and well-informed as we try to change the world.
Did you read TFA? They tried that and failed. Stanford and Cal have referred to The Big Game for a hundred years or so.
Beware of the Leopard.
Good lord, it's depressing how completely corporations have people brainwashed.
you're using other peoples entertainment content to create a nicer place, which in turn creates you income.
No, you're using entertainment you *paid for* in a way that suits you.
....
* And don't start talking about how "it's licensed, not bought" either. Try to tell someone the carpet they bought is "licensed, not bought" and see if you can finish talking before they start laughing and throw you off of their "purchased, not licensed" property.
No but I can give you another example. If you're living on rent, you're not allowed to do just anything you want to the apartment. You need to ask your landlord if its acceptable, and he will probably make sure it's done correctly, or if he doesn't like it, he will deny you from doing it.
Now try to still do your "I'm gonna open this wall and break windows" thing and then tell in court that "but I was just using what I *paid for* in a way that suited me".
Now if you actually bought the apartment, things are different and you can decide yourself. Otherwise you're getting it at certain rules and you have to follow them.
welcome to fake capitalism. nothing new to see here, run along and do as you're told, not as we do.
What the NFL is "losing out on" is a share of the profits from the bar. They are just upset that they don't make even more money off of their schlock. Of course, if we're really to buy the reasoning that a bar profits more by showing the superbowl, then we may as well say that grocery stores should have to keep track of what you're buying food for and have to share with the NFL their "extra" profits from sales of beer and chips destined to be watched while the game is on. Heck, this could be a whole new revenue stream for media companies; going to watch the news while eating dinner? $$$ to local news channel. Like to have the today show on with your ham and eggs? Those pig and chicken farmers better pony up to NBC.
Some new "licensed" or "official" content required you have DRM approved connections every step of the way to play it. That means an approved machine, an approved tv, an approved HDMI cable, every single step must be on the "ok to run licensed content" list. The handshaking constantly between them all causes problems - as does any DRM given enough time.
Which brings us right back to needing pirated content to be certain it plays properly on a given system . . . D'oh!
I am not a crackpot.
It's an OK analogy as far as it goes, but...
In most locations, renters do have some codified rights that limit what the landlord can do. Those rights are legal under the constitution for states or municipalities to set.
For copyright, there are some normal rights (fair use) that have not been formally codified enough and so don't really offer protection. There are other rights (first sale), that can't be protected by states or smaller locales any more because the Supreme court has held all copyright related law is federal only. So it's not entirely similar.
Who is John Cabal?
unless you've never used electricity from a utility company which received public grants or subsidies for construction, you've never used public roads, public transportation, or public sidewalks to get to work, and you've never used the United States Postal Service.
Uh, except that people are PAYING to use all of those, not the government paying them. Nice analogy, but it's a little backwards.
to continue your analogy, the Republican bills were "let's give the Cancer patient AIDS too".