Bad Sports?
The reason? The NCAA can be pretty picky when it comes to where footage from its games is shown. "Sports rights holders typically don't allow use of their footage online," says Mike Sims, CBSNews.com director of news and operations. "In this case, we probably could have used it because CBS owns the online rights. But it's just standard procedure for us to cut it out. The league is protected so tightly that we just sort of have a blanket policy."
It's not just the NCAA that doesn't take kindly to use of its footage. In February, Brooklyn Law School professor Wendy Seltzer posted a YouTube clip onto her personal blog of the copyright message that the National Football League aired during the Super Bowl.
The message will be familiar to football fans: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited."
Seltzer has a problem with the message, however: It makes no allowance for fair use, the doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. Which is why she posted the video of the copyright message, along with this note: "Let's see whether the video, clear fair use, gets flagged by a copyright bot."
You can guess what happened next: Five days later, after the NFL claimed copyright violation, the clip was removed from YouTube. That led to a back and forth between the league and the professor which Jacqui Cheng characterizes as the "NFL [apparently] choosing to beat [Seltzer] over the head with takedown requests."
Seltzer's situation and CBSNews.com's decision not to air the Mason story – even though CBS owns the online rights – point to how tightly sports leagues control their content. YouTube's role in this is interesting, too: According to Cheng, the company tends to "comply immediately and ask questions later" when it receives takedown requests. But if Seltzer takes her battle to court and wins, "it may force content owners to be more cautious about sending takedown notices in the future."