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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."
We talked about this two years ago. Copyright still sucks, nothing new here.
P.S.: Amazingly, that was on February, 2nd 2008. I wonder if we will be talking about Yahoo considering an alliance with Google tomorrow!
If you can't mod them join them.
so being in New Orleans, I'll have a "Who Dat" Party ... oh wait... "© Dat" Party.
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/01/vitter_to_nfl_back_of_who_dat.html
...call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright.
Summary fail. Perhaps you mean trademark?
A better choice, for a myriad of reasons, is to not vote for an incumbent this November.
I can dream.
Just don't charge for food, or call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
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.
This is news for nerds, remember?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Can I call it a Superb Owl party?
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
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.
From the summary:
The article directly contradicts both of those claims.
It's one thing to comment without RTFA, but to submit without RTFA takes a special kind of stupid.
...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
Just don't...call it a 'Super Bowl' party, since the term itself is copyright.
The term is not copyrighted. The term is trademarked.
The trademark status has advantages and disadvantages. Since it's been registered and in use for at least 5 years (since 1969 in fact), the trademark is much harder to invalidate, per 15 USC 1065. Unlike copyrights, trademarks really do last forever, given proper maintenance (yes, I realize that copyrights practically last forever too, but there are trademarks that are centuries old).
Some of the disadvantages of a trademark are that the remedies are weaker (no statutory damages) and the trademark holder must police the mark. You can't license it to just anybody. You have to maintain some control over the licensed good or service, typically in the form of quality standards. You also have to go after potential infringers. Failure to do so can lead to losing the mark.
It's that last requirement that is driving the NFL's actions here (well, that and the money to be made). Whether the law in fact requires them to be as strict about it as they are is another question, one that very few people on Slashdot are really competent to answer. Whether the law should require them to be so strict, however, is a different question and one that most of us probably agree on the answer to.
As a side note, footage of individual games is copyrighted. The NFL argues that footage of the game is licensed only for private viewing and not for commercial viewing, which is how they go after sports bars and the like. I would argue that if you put your game on the public airwaves, it should be fair game for live viewing. If they want to enter into a more restrictive license with the viewer they should put the game on pay per view, a premium channel, or a cable channel at the very least.
I'll let you call me son if I get to soup your wife's bowl at the party.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Old political truism: Every Congressman is a pork-seeking self-centered bought-and-paid-for idiot. Except for my representative. He's okay.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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!
Only fourteen steps until equilibrium! Apparently the final phrase is, "My son is a bowl of soup, my wife calls from your party."
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.
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."
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
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.