Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright."
I'd like to hear a lawyer stand up and say that with a straight face. Trademarked? Possibly. Copyright? Not likely. And even it was a registered mark, I fail to see what food has to do with anything, or how it would be actionable unless the rightsholder is organising similar events that might be confused with whatever private viewing we're talking about here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2010/02/halftime-who-dat-whos-greedy-the-nfl/1
You missed the one important part, anywhere there is money involved there will be claims. The NFL is claiming ownership of a fan derived saying, let alone one where most of it has been part of the dialect
Never under estimate money, lawyers, and stupidity, combined.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Sometimes I think it will be the NFL that finally breaks the camel's back of copyright mutation rather than the MPAA/RIAA idiots. The NFL takes the farce of "intellectual property" to such absurd levels that even congressmen might be able to see the lack of clothing.
...my Super Bowl party is going to involve games of Chez Geek, Hero Quest, and a Civ 4 LAN.
Anything remotely related to Football is banned.
Living With a Nerd
The thing is, I dare the super-bowl to try and attack some of the clients I helped set up a super-bowl party for. One is a big time lawyer who will have 2 150" screens and 5 62" plasmas all blasting the game for his 100 guests. He's a lawyer for a firm that will eat the NFL for lunch and crap in their cheerios.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not nearly so simple. The legal landscape and market are very complicated. For example, if you changed the law to allow public showings of consumer-aimed DVDs, that will cut into the separately-marketed and priced versions currently legal for such use. Thus, the $15 DVD you can currently buy will go up in price to offset the lost revenue. So in some sense, the reason you can buy a "reasonably" priced copy of the movie is that its production is subsidized by the other market.
I'm not saying it's right, but you really shouldn't be so knee-jerk about this. The content producers and providers do need channels to make money, and while I generally agree that copyright laws are a mess right now, taking away every method they have to be profitable is not a solution for anything. All the slashdot wankery aside, this is a big problem: how do you maintain a viable production industry when their product becomes free to copy. For music or live theater, you can wave your hands about performance revenues, etc, but there's not an equivalent for movies or television programs. Most of the simplistic stuff thrown around here is a joke in this regard. A whole self-consistent system needs to be constructed. That's hard.
I think you answered your own (implied) question in your post. People take measures to avoid being forcibly subjected to advertisement when they don't want to be, or when it's an inconvenience to them (I'm looking at you, unskippable DVD previews!). Watching ads willingly when desired is not inconsistent with this.