All Blog Posts from Public Eye

If you're even a casual baseball fan, you're probably familiar with these words: "Any rebroadcast, reproduction or other use of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited."

Once it became clear that New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle had been killed in yesterday's tragic airplane crash in New York, news organizations began scrambling for images of Lidle. They also scrambled for video of Lidle pitching – or would have, had they not known that it is nearly impossible to use such video without paying a significant sum to Major League Baseball.

"It is extremely frustrating to not have access to these materials," said CBSNews.com Editorial Director Dick Meyer, who remembers consistently being told as an "Evening News" producer that it is too expensive to use baseball footage in news stories.

"I think it's outrageous that Major League Baseball and other professional sports so aggressively protect their licensed material when players and people connected to baseball are in the news," he continued. "I thought it was the national pastime, not the copyright protection coalition."

Added Meyer: "I cannot see how withholding short clips of people playing baseball who are in the news is good citizenship or serves any public good other than the financial interests of some owners."

A representative from Major League Baseball did not return a call for comment.

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We’ve seen that there are a host of restrictions on how much networks other than NBC – which owns the rights to the coverage – can broadcast of the Olympic Games. There’s also a reason why on the evening news broadcasts on Wednesday night, you only caught a few clips of Brit Hume’s interview with Vice President Dick Cheney. To see the entire interview, you’d have to be watching Fox News. Of course, the same standard was true of Bob Schieffer’s interview with President Bush a few weeks back – if you wanted to see the whole thing, you had to watch it on CBS. These programs are considered the property of their respective networks, so they’re subject to copyright laws.

When it comes to news material (among other things), however, something called “fair use” applies. I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds because, well, I’m not a lawyer and you’d likely fall asleep at your keyboard. (For those interested, there’s a good overview here.) Instead, I’ll offer just a bit of insight about how and why these interviews appear as they do.

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