by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
While we're on the subject on this Super Bowl weekend, there are a at least two other pressing football-related matters that ought to be rectified. The first is one of those rare cases where Gregg Easterbrook might be right. The NFL's contract with DirecTV gives them exclusive rights to broadcast out-of-market-games, in the form of NFL Sunday Ticket. This limits the availability of the football fanatic package to those willing and able to put a dish on their roof—only a fraction of American homeonwers, and very few renters—and allows the satellite provider to charge monopolistic prices for the games. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) has threatened to take Congressional action against the NFL to get them to change this practice. Specter's specific proposal to allow teams to negotiate individually isn't the greatest idea, but simply holding aggressive hearings might be enough to get the NFL to think twice before renewing their deal with DirecTV. [Before you get the idea that Specter is a consumer's movement populist, let's remember that Comcast is headquartered in Pennsylvania.]
The second is a similar deal, granting EA Sports exclusive rights to use the team names, player names, and player images in video games, freezing out 2K Sports, ESPN Video Games, and any fledgling competitors that might want to break into the sports video game market (EA signed the deal specifically to freeze out ESPN, which had made a quality NFL game and sold it for $20). Granting exclusive rights to use team & player names seems roughly on par with copyrighting the phone book; names come awfully close to "facts", which are of course not copyrightable.
The "problem" here is that the NFL is currently a money printing machine not only for NFL owners and its players, but also for television networks, advertisers, and video game makers. So it's natural for all these companies to seek a monopoly in their particular, and the current state of intellectual property & contract law allows them to do that. Now, it's not clear what rules you'd make to keep these exclusive rights shenanigans to a minimum without totally imploding the copyright system, but it's worth considering alternatives to the status quo.
