USA Today’s On Deadline blog shares a fascinating dispute between the stodgy old NCAA and a mainstream media company over the practice of live blogging.
The NCAA had a newspaper reporter tossed out of the press box yesterday because he was posting updates on a baseball game to the The Louisville Courier-Journal’s website.
The NCAA argues in a memo that blogs are a “live representation of the game” that violate copyright restrictions, therefore “no blog entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each game.”
The paper, which is owned by the same company as USA TODAY, thinks that’s nonsense. “Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV. Everybody sees it. The NCAA can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis,” the paper’s lawyer says.
