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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."
This is news for nerds, remember?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
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.
[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!
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
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.