Welcome to your SEC, where everything other than the air you breathe is monetized. And that which is not expressly permitted is forbidden:
… It seems that the 40 or so videos of old Bulldog games I had posted on YouTube over the last one-and-a-half years and embedded into my blog posts were committing copyright infringement. XOS Digital – a division of XOS Technologies, Inc., and the group behind the SEC Digital Network – has apparently been on a mission to rid the Internet of any video depicting members of the SEC. They finally caught up to me a few days ago, and in the process, got rid of every last one of my 40+ freakin’ videos that I spent hours cutting up and preparing!
Suddenly, without any sort of notification or warning of my wrong doing, my blog was temporarily removed, all of my videos were wiped out, and my YouTube account was suspended.
Look, I get the need for some of this. The conference doesn’t want entire games posted on YouTube when it derives some financial benefit from controlling distribution.
But Patrick Garbin is posting clips from games more than a decade ago on a fan blog. He’s not trying to generate commercial competition; he’s simply encouraging interest from a (relatively) small number of folks with a passion for a football program. Hell, if anything, should he manage to whet somebody’s appetite with a post, with a little effort, that’s something SEC Digital Networks ought to be able to make a buck off of, as Gawd and Mike Slive intended.
You’d think that fan interest is something precious and worth nurturing. But this is the SEC, which has a hard time seeing past anyone’s wallet now. I may be disappointed, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
Get The Picture 
Ahh – the love of money…
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Hey, they’ve gotta make as much money as possible so they can pay the play… oh wait.
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Self-reply: I used to work in local TV news. It makes sense to me that you can’t just record someone’s telecast and then re-post it somewhere, whether you’re making money off of it or not. But the thing that still boggles my mind is that the NFL (and now the SEC, it seems) claims the games themselves as intellectual property. So, if you happen to have a sideline photo pass to the game and are recording it with your own equipment from your own angle with your own talent and aims for coverage, guess what? They still own it. Every year before the season starts, the NFL sends out a very long form with a list of do’s and don’ts, and one of them is that you can’t use video from a game (including video that you shot yourself) that’s more than a week old. That’s when it becomes theirs. Now, a lot of local affiliates ignore it, and ESPN/FSN/etc. have contracts where they’ve paid a lot of money for the right to keep using it. But if you’ve ever wondered why you see so much practices video on the news, that’s why. And you know what? That’s ridiculous.
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….and also questionable (to me) on the grounds that the University of Georgia isn’t a private institution. It takes public money. The campus and event the stadium belong to whom? The athletic dept. is funded by TV, bowl, contributions, gate, and other means, but is one of those means the citizens of Georgia?
How can what happens there, in an open venue, not be free for anyone to witness and record? (this thought comes from a person who is admittedly simple minded on legal issues)
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Well, just to clarify, I don’t know if the SEC has taken it to that extreme yet, but you can bet they’re jealous of the NFL’s rules and are creeping towards them. I don’t think they’ve started taking down fan videos from the stands, but a few of my old friends from the TV biz like to post their raw video on YouTube from games, and I am pretty sure that’s about to go away.
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James Brown wants his royalties Senator. The SEC called and said so. Please send the check to Mike Slive. Hell take care of it.
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I suppose Patrick’s embedded video clips are technical copyright violations, BUT, (1) how much extra revenue will someone earn by removing those videos, (2) why couldn’t they offer Patrick a fixed fee license and pick up a little money instead of (3) why did they have to be complete pricks to show who has the power?
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…because they are some mighty powerful pricks.
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Intellectual property law in this country is out of control.
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A friend of mine said that the other day. And now he wants you to remove this comment and give him $50.
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Monsanto’s henchmen await you at your front door.
Resistance is futile.
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Because at Monsanto they always Roundup the usual suspects
http://wjlta.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/a-roundup-of-federal-circuit-monsanto-patent-suits-in-light-of-monsanto-v-bowman/
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It’s the same issue the MPAA had with trying to control their media online, and why they wanted Congress to pass the SOPA/PIPA bills. Instead of adapting and evolving to new technologies and trying to come up with new ways to do business on the Internet, they’re just shutting everything down so they can stick to their old, outdated business models.
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Exactly. Imagine where we would be now if the horse breeders and carriage makers had lobbied Congress for a SOPA/PIPA type bill to stop the manufacturing of automobiles.
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XOS has the option to leave the clips up on YouTube and make money off of inserted ads (the technology is there: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10027509-93.html). But instead, they choose to keep things w/in their proprietary SEC video network and try to gouge the average fan out of $.
There needs to be some sort of line drawn between last week’s highlights and backlog, archival films ala Patrick Garbin’s. Another big potential problem w/ XOS could be fan-created ‘highlight’ films, which depending on the amount of content the user adds (and the context) could technically be legal under the Fair Use doctrine, yet will be immediately taken down by Youtube upon complaint.
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He should put together a compilation DVD and market it off his website and sell those.
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The SEC is the Metallica of the FBS conferences.
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Somewhere an SEC coach is watching a video of a high school football game, filmed by the high school or maybe a parent. Maybe the GHSA should demand royalties.
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Ain’t nothin’ free and ain’t nothin’ public anymore. It’s all been privatized.
At least we don’t have pay toilets yet. Maybe the SEC can pioneer something along those lines – 100,000 people per game, average of 2 trips to the potty per stadium visit….
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