Battles ensue over revenue for pro sports

Streams of income – that is what all businesses look for and major league sports are businesses.

This past week the New York Times and other newspapers settled a dispute with Major League Baseball regarding the use of photographs and stories generated by the paper’s personnel at games. MLB had tried to restrict the use of such materials, saying papers could only use them “in connection with news coverage, or magazines, books and stories, about the games.”

The New York Times said MLB was viewing games as private events, with the rights to everything regarding the games as being controlled by MLB, rather than the games being a public news event, as viewed by the paper.

The Times challenged the attempted restrictions as violating intellectual property rights and the First Amendment rights of free speech of the paper. The Times referred to the NBA’s previous attempt to deny paging companies the right to transmit running scores from game sites. The NBA lost its case in court.

The Times and MLB reached an agreement that allowed the paper to continue to use photos and stories as in the past, but gave MLB access to these items for their use from the files of the paper, together with an “MLB.com” notation that would run with the items when used in anything other than the game stories.

The issue was serious enough that on the weekend before the opening of the MLB season, many newspapers had said they would not cover the games if the restrictions were put in place by MLB.

The issue is all about MLB trying to find new streams of revenue, particularly from the Internet. You may have seen the stories on MLB now charging for fans to listen to games over the Internet. You can buy packages of games for particular teams or an MLB package that covers all teams.

MLB wants to limit anyone else using pictures, stories and game accounts that might interfere with such income streams. That engendered the dispute.

There will be more such disputes. The day is not far off when live game video coverage will be available on the Internet. Will the availability of real-time scores available through a paging system affect the sale of such coverage?

MLB, and other sports, also are concerned about pictures of players and game action being used in a commercial setting, such as streamers on a newspaper’s Web site. The sports want the right to sell such use. The papers say the materials generated by their employees belong to the paper, that the events are public, and how the papers use such materials is entirely up to them.

One of the hottest issues in the law today is the redefining of the rights to such materials in light of the array of new ways that pictures, stories and video/audio descriptions of games can be transmitted. If the leagues do not act to protect this property, they will lose the rights as a matter of normal custom and usage.

If the leagues push too hard, they end up with coverage being curtailed or negated, and no sport can live with that.

So, for the moment, MLB has settled the issue for the current year with the newspapers and coverage continues, but the development of the law and customs dealing with these matters have just begun.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and NBC sportscaster.