Cease and desist all thinking or premonitions relating to the FIFA World Cup
Link: Boing Boing: Hideous company sends Boing Boing a pre-emptive nastygram.
Robert Loch of Soflow.com posted a note (membership req’d) about Boing Boing getting a ‘pre-emptive nastygram’ from Infront Media’s lawyers, Baker & McKenzie. Ooh dear.
The letter goes on to warn Boing Boing that Baker & McKenzie will be “actively monitoring your website … to identify unlawful activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to ensure the protection of Infront’s rights of those licenses.”
It’s all very well whacking out a letter to an array of websites that might link to World Cup content, however I wonder how exactly Baker & McKenzie will go about preventing infringement via mobile.
I wonder what the position is if you go to a match and record some of it on your Nokia N90? Fine, I suppose. It’s for personal use, right? What if you then forward that to your friend via MMS?
What if you publish the video to a password protected blog using ShoZu? Fine, I would imagine? It’s my content that I recorded personally and I’m publishing it on my password protected blog. One would imagine anyway. What if there were 5 million viewers of my blog? 😉
What if I took the video and uploaded it to Youtube?
What if I was standing outside the shop of a TV retailer whose TVs were showing action from the FIFA World Cup — and I recorded 60 seconds of footage on my mobile, then whacked that directly to Youtube?
My Nokia N90 will do an hour’s worth of video on one 1gb memory card — provided I was sat with a good view, I could, one imagines, record the whole match. Or is it like the cinema? Are you banned from taking recording equipment into the ground?
You know what would be cool? Give 100 fans each a Nokia and have them film portions from the match and then edit it all together as a fan-based mash-up.
Anyway as for the legal positioning, it’s getting awfully gray when you start introducing mobile video and various what-ifs … who is the content owner? Who’s doing the distributing? Me or the mobile operator. Probably me. How do you handle 56,000 blogs springing up overnight, every night each hosting World Cup video footage? Hmm.
The last thing Infront Sports & Media would need from a positive PR perspecitve, one assumes, is to do a music industry style lawsuit and bring a case against a 14 year old who publishes some match footage.
As for Boing Boing, I particularly liked Mark’s closing statement on his post, complete with link a Daily Mail article about one of their lawyers, £4 and a dry cleaning bill (I kept the link in):
Baker & McKenzie, be on alert: henceforth, Boing Boing will be actively monitoring your website to identify dumbass activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to point out instances of wasting clients’ money by sending out unnecessary and obnoxious warning letters.”
