Saturday, January 31, 2015
The NFL wants you to think these things are illegal
Ars Technica: The Super Bowl is the NFL’s flagship event each year, and the league has invested a lot in the event’s branding and broadcasting. In light of that investment, it’s understandable that the NFL would be protective of its trademarks and copyrights surrounding it. But that protectiveness has led to the NFL, and other businesses around it, perpetuating a number of myths about what you can and can’t do with the Super Bowl—including the words “Super Bowl.”
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3 comments:
This particular instance is an excellent illustration of the fine line that exists between protecting something, and alienating one's audience. A quick perusal of the comments following this article reveals a sense that many are fed up with the NFL's antics in this regard. While I understand the NFL's protectiveness, in a way this clamp down seems almost counterproductive. Football is at its core a social sport - it brings many unlike people together under a common cause. It fosters camaraderie with strangers, and loyalty to something larger than yourself. And I think the NFL is only hurting itself by trying to shut down the "civilian" discussion and dispersion of the game. If the NFL encouraged, or at least "allowed" discussion and description of the game, viewership might go up. Instead of the game feeling like something that was for the NFL, it might instead return its focus to its real audience - the at home viewers. These trademark antics seem very corporate, and often once something develops that corporate undercurrent, the everyday American loses interest.
I think it so interesting how so many people are in the dark about how trademarks and copyrights work. I myself am a little fuzzy on the finer details of the laws surrounding them, but the NFL certainly should not be. I doubt they actually think they can prohibit people from discussing, recording the game, but I do think their main concern is stopping people from making money off of selling products, like copies of the game or commentary on it, as though they are official NFL products.
When the article talked about grocery stores and restaurants referring to the Super Bowl as “the big game,” I was surprised that it was an effort to avoid copyright infringement. I always thought that it was just so they could run those ads throughout the entire season and in different team territories without having to record multiple versions of which game they were referring to each week.
So I understand how the NFL is trying to be protective of it’s copyright on the Super Bowl, and all of the other games it puts on every year. I even understand if they try to be overprotective of that copyright, as they definitely do not want to be ripped off after they invest so much time and money into their games. But I do disagree with how aggressive they are with their ‘defense’ of the copyright. Often times, the general perception is that the giant corporation that is the NFL is attacking the often times significantly smaller party that has talked about the Super Bowl, usually with less than malicious intentions, for as much money as the court will give them. I also think that another aspect of this is that because of the NFL’s aggressive reputation, many parties simply just do not want to risk the media attention, let alone a humungous fine. So while there is a level of rationality in the premise of their actions, the NFL (in my opinion) can take it too far.
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