Technology Liberation Front - Latest Comments in Who Can Film Video Clips at a Pro Football Stadium?

Re: Who Can Film Video Clips at a Pro Football Stadium?

Kate — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:15:42 -0000

Extremely interesting.

This is a bit beside the point, but I'm a university student currently writing a paper on the narrative and visual structures of broadcast NFL games, and the aspects you mentioned (slo-mo, cheesy music, voice-overs) make the televised pro football game a completely different phenomenon from the college game, or watching a game in person.
One of the basic premises of my paper is that football's woes under accusations of homoeroticism and such are vastly compounded by the way in which NFL presents its games. I personally don't know, or care, whether there are homoerotic implications in the game itself - plenty of people have offered highly emotionally charged arguments on both sides, and I want nothing to do with it - but I do think that the specific qualities of NFL games blatantly situate the male body as an object of visual desire, regardless of whether the viewer accepts this position or not. A camera view which takes scopophilic pleasure in all moments of male bodily contact - slowing it down, presenting it from every conceivable angle, yadda yadda - is making a certain statement about how the viewer is intended to experience and interact with the objects on the screen. Obviously the people who watch the game will see it and want to see it in a variety of different ways, as you have expressed above, which I think might be a good argument for local broadcasting generally - what if the viewers don't want to assume that sort of gaze when watching the game? They should at least have the choice. (And if they are given the choice and choose NFL anyway, then what does that say about the experience of viewing football games more generally?)

On the question of the rights of fans and local broadcasters to film videos at pro games, I'd say that if the right to access the game has been bought (and that is, after all, what a ticket means - the ability to access a specific event at a specific time and location) then anyone there has a certain claim to that experience which they've paid for. If the technology exists to record that experience, then anyone who has bought the right to access the experience (fan or local station) has the right to record it so that they may relive their purchased experience in a more tangible sense than in memory. It's the same principle behind the CD - you don't pay $12 for the little piece of plastic, you pay for the right to access the songs it contains, and access them at your convenience.
What of local broadcasting, which extends the experience to fans at home who have not bought access? The thing is, in subscribing to local access and paying the monthly cable fees, the viewers at home buy the rights to the access enjoyed by local broadcasters, with restrictions on convenience (they can only watch what the local station has chosen to broadcast, so viewers have mediated access). This setup is perfectly reasonable, and the only problem is that NFL doesn't get enough money out of it. Hence, as the most powerful agent involved (and they've got the larger television networks on their side), the rules get changed.

I agree with the previous commenters on this post, and suggest that the absurdity of this situation provoke reconsideration of the notion of 'intellectual property' and 'intellectual property rights,' which are here invoked by the NFL in the form of copyright, and which (I believe) are not very valid or useful in general, except to serve established powerful interests at the expense of everyone else. Let culture be free again.

Re: Who Can Film Video Clips at a Pro Football Stadium?

Scott Carpenter — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 16:56:07 -0000

Ah, a subject of interest to me since lately the area I live in, Hennepin County, Minnesota, is gearing up to "tax and spend" to build stadiums for our professional baseball and football teams.

The Twins already have gotten approval for their stadium in Minneapolis, having circumvented a law that is supposed to require a referendum on tax hikes for projects like this. The Vikings I'm sure will get their's next year.

So now you've just given me something more to be annoyed at when the MLB and NFL inevitably try milking their monopolies. We're paying for these toys but they derive most of the benefits. (I know, we can discuss how much the city benefits, but I would have liked to allow the people to decide on this one. I think we'll get to vote on a tax increase for transportation spending soon, which I think would have a good chance of passing. So nice that we're allowed to vote on things that people will approve. Yes, I'm bitter.)

Aside from my personal annoyance at not getting to vote against paying for stadiums, good comments above on where this is leading. People need to start seeing the importance of having a free culture. It might sound unrealistically science fictionish now to talk about cameras that can't take pictures of certain physical objects, but that day might arrive if things go badly for freedom.

Re: Who Can Film Video Clips at a Pro Football Stadium?

Steve_R — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:13:42 -0000

We have descened into a form of anarachy where anyone who so much as touches (observes) "content" as it passes from one entity to another entity is claiming the right to exact a revenue "toll". This has gone beyond the realm of reason.

This reminds me of the recent baseball statistics brouhaha. See "Who Owns Baseball Statistics" at http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/16...

Also see article "Tell baseball to dream on" on "Legal Affairs" at http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-Dec...

Re: Who Can Film Video Clips at a Pro Football Stadium?

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 11:58:12 -0000

Interesting point about the personal cameras. It brings up another problem: does anyone own reality? It's a given that the owners can decide who they let into what areas, i.e., letting a local broadcaster up to the sidelines to shoot. But what happens at that stadium is not a creative work someone created, it's a Real Event.

Is it possible to grant or possess an exclusive right to reality, which would forbid you from taking pictures on a personal camera and putting them on a blog. Even it the images themselves are trademarks, they are physical structures that exist in a real place when the camera recorded them.

If it's possible to own that, all visual journalism goes to hell because it would require exclusive permission to record any given place or thing.