Silverwolf's Auditorium

We've been hearing stories detailing the stupid moves from the NFL and MLB acting like they own all things related to the sport.  They have repeatedly sued people for quoting statistics (and lost), they have issued cease and desist notices to people who use a logo on a website or in a you-tube video, they try to bully journalists into providing only the news coverage they like, over and over on and on ad nauseum.

This year is no different, we see the following story excerpt from Techdirt :

From Techdirt:

Once Again (With Feeling!): Court Tells Major League Baseball It Does Not Own Facts

Major League Baseball has been tilting at windmills for years, claiming ownership of facts -- even though facts cannot be covered by copyright. This resulted in a lawsuit over whether or not companies that provide fantasy baseball services online needed to pay MLB for a license to use player's names and stats.

MLB has been doing this kind of thing for years and it's been all over the Internet, the simple truth is that facts  are free for anyone to use and cannot be copyrighted.  That isn't going to change, otherwise news services and bloggers everywhere would be completely shut down.

Cubbies Baseball, which describes itself as a "sportal" -- a sports portal -- for Cubs fans, had its MySpace page shut down at the request of Major League Baseball last week. More than 3,000 "friends" of the site went down the drain with the MySpace page, according to Cubbies Baseball proprietor Bryan McGraw in a blog post. Yet another example of a Sports Organization claiming that they own everything, even though this seems like a clear case of "fair use" to me you also have to realize that the author of the page had even licensed use of the logo for use on his main web site! This is just stupid, no one was going to be confused and think the myspace page was an official site for the Cubs which is the only thing trademark law is intended to prevent.