Fair Use and First Amendment: Without Fair Use, What Would You Freely Speak About?

The question this paper tries to answer is: Without fair use, what would you freely speak about? This paper will seek to demonstrate that the Copyright Clause’s Fair Use doctrine, and the First Amendment are cousins who help each other, rather than enemies sworn to destroy each other as some believe. First I will give a brief overview and history of each doctrine. Next I will speak about three areas where I believe fair use and the First Amendment cross paths extensively. These areas are: (1) school/education; (2) social media and news; and (3) sports images/broadcasting. Finally, I will demonstrate how fair use is as important if not more important than the First Amendment for these categories that I have listed

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Material-Connection Disclosures: Endorsers, Instagram, and the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides

With the spread of social-media advertising, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made many attempts to regulate the burgeoning field. However, the complexity of social media makes it difficult to regulate without violating the First Amendment. This difficulty is especially true for Instagram, a social-media platform where pictures—a form of speech protected by the First Amendment—are the primary focal point. This Note argues that the FTC’s material-connection disclosure requirement potentially violates the First Amendment as it applies to Instagram advertisements. Instead of focusing on audience perception when determining whether an endorser must include a material-connection disclosure, the FTC should instead consider the poster’s intent in sharing an Instagram post to prevent any chilling of speech or violations of posters’ First Amendment rights

Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time

Copyright @ 2010 ACMIn this paper we explore the production of streaming media that involves live and recorded content. To examine this, we report on how the production practices and process are conducted through an empirical study of the production of live television, involving the use of live and non-live media under highly time critical conditions. In explaining how this process is managed both as an individual and collective activity, we develop the concept of temporal hybridity to explain the properties of these kinds of production system and show how temporally separated media are used, understood and coordinated. Our analysis is examined in the light of recent developments in computing technology and we present some design implications to support amateur video production.The research was partly made possible by a grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems to the Mobile Life VinnExcellence Center, in partnership with SonyEricsson, Ericsson, Microsoft Research, Nokia Research, TeliaSonera and the City of Stockholm

Making It Pay to be a Fan: The Political Economy of Digital Sports Fandom and the Sports Media Industry

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard component of the cultural industry. The first case study is of Bleacher Report, a fan blogging platform turned major digital sports journalism company. Bleacher Report’s journey from an industry-reviled content farm to major player in digital sports journalism is traced to argue that Bleacher Report’s business model relied on the desperation of aspiring writers only as long as those writers were unpaid. The second case study is of DraftKings and Fanduel, the industry leaders in the fantasy sports genre of daily fantasy sports (DFS). These two companies have seemingly overnight taken over the new field but just as quickly thrust themselves into legal scrutiny that threatened to shut down the entire field of DFS. The proximity to gambling that threatened their legal status also, whoever, belies their relationship to the financialized understanding of that all of fantasy sports represents. The third and final case study is of ESPN. By far the oldest and most powerful of the three cases, ESPN, the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” has made the majority of its money off its innovation of the per subscriber fee, or the fee that ESPN charges cable companies to carry it that is then passed onto individual subscribers whether they watch ESPN or not. As digital technologies have revolutionized the delivery of visual images of sport and the cable bundle that ESPN is the most expensive part of loses market share, ESPN’s ability to monetize both attention and non-attention greatly decreases. The concluding chapter takes these case studies and attempts to synthesize them into a theory of what is termed “contentification,” or the tendency of digital technologies to take disparate forms of records (text, numbers, images) and treat them as “content” to be paid attention to. Sports are particularly prone to contentification and have helped drive the exponential expansion of content to be paid attention to that has resulted in a crisis of attention where the amount of content outstrips the human capacity to take it in. The reconfiguration of capital that finds its expression in the ending of net neutrality is the response to this crisis

New Media, Professional Sport and Political Economy

New media technologies are seen to be changing the production, delivery and consumption of professional sports and creating a new dynamic between sports fans, athletes, clubs, governing bodies and the mainstream media. However, as Bellamy and McChesney (2011) have pointed out, advances in digital technologies are taking place within social, political, and economic contexts that are strongly conditioning the course and shape of this communication revolution. This essay assesses the first wave of research on professional sport and new media technologies and concludes that early trends indicate the continuation of existing neoliberal capitalist tendencies within professional sport. Using the concept of political economy, the essay explores issues of ownership, structure, production and delivery of sport. Discussion focuses on the opportunities sports fans now have available to them and how sports organization and media corporations shifted from an initial position of uncertainty, that bordered on hostility, to one which has seen them embrace new media technologies as powerful marketing tools. The essay concludes by stating as fundamental the issues of ownership and control and advocates that greater cognizance be accorded to underlying economic structures and the enduring, all-pervasive power of neoliberal capitalism and its impact in professional sport

Online Fantasy Sports Litigation and the Need for a Federal Right of Publicity Statute

The right of publicity is currently a jumble of state common law and state statutes, but the online fantasy sports industry crosses state lines with ease. Having witnessed the great revenue potential of online fantasy sports, professional sports leagues are trying to strong-arm independent fantasy sports providers out of the business by using the right of publicity to assert property interests in the statistics generated by professional players, and used by fantasy sports providers to run their online games. The first such attempt--by Major League Baseball--failed. However, the state law nature of the right of publicity prevents any single court opinion from binding the industry or other jurisdictions. The National Football League is attempting to achieve a more favorable result in a different jurisdiction. If successful, other professional sports leagues will be encouraged to litigate the issue, and Major League Baseball might even attempt to re-litigate its position in other states. This free-for-all could result in different rules for different sports in different states, which would not only be untenable for the online fantasy sports providers, but a violation of the Constitution as well. A cohesive federal right of publicity statute would (1) bring uniformity to the doctrine, (2) give federal courts (where these actions are being brought) a federal law to apply instead of allowing them to continue muddying the application of state laws, (3) directly address First Amendment concerns, and (4) solve the dormant commerce clause violation alluded to above

Persona Development for the Polar Park Mobile Application

The Worcester Red Sox plan to open the world\u27s most innovative ballpark in the heart of Worcester, Massachusetts. To achieve this goal, the company is developing a stadium-specific mobile application that will provide the best user experience. Working out of the Worcester Community Project Center, our main goal was to survey the target population, in order to understand what benefits people are looking for in this mobile application. With over 400 responses to our survey, this information was sorted, analyzed, and relayed to the Worcester Red Sox as to what features they should include in their mobile application. Our data was displayed in the form of a benefit/feature infographic and seven personas that represented the potential users of this mobile application

MEASURING ACCOMMODATION ON FACEBOOK BETWEEN SINGLE-A MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL TEAMS AND FACEBOOK USERS

The following research was designed to introduce CAT into a practical setting for social media managers while primarily examining Minor League Baseball (MiLB) at the Single-A level. Single-A baseball has not been examined solely in a social media setting, which was why this level of MiLB was selected. Study A was designed to measure the levels of accommodation across various posting strategies (neoliberal, social, team related, open code) and the subsequent number of likes and number of comments accompanying each post. The accommodation scores, measured through the Language Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC, pronounced “Luke”), accompanied by a series of algorithms, and the traditional measures for traditional Facebook metrics were measured using a regression analysis. There was some evidence to suggest that number of comments was correlated to LSM scores, while various posting types were significant at the team level. Study B was designed to measure the differences between the most and least liked Single-A MiLB Facebook pages in terms of levels of accommodation. This exploration utilized regression to measure accommodation’s influence on likes and number of comments. As expected, traditional Facebook metrics such as likes and number of comments per post were higher for the team with more page likes, although accommodation scores were higher for the team with fewer page likes. The implications of these studies, and future direction for social media academics and practitioners, are also explored