Under NFL Rule, Media Web Sites Are Given Just 45 Seconds to Score – washingtonpost.com

From the organization that brought you the exaggerated “Any other use of this telecast … without the NFL’s consent, is prohibited.” statement at the end of every game, the NFL has imposed new rules on news organizations.

News organizations can post no more than 45 seconds per day of video shot at a team’s facilities, including news conferences, interviews and practice-field reports.

While outcome of a legal dispute can never be clear, “news reporting” is an explicitly stated fair use under section 107. Some parallels might also be drawn to the “human cannonball” case, Zacchini vs. Scripps-Howard. While this was really a right-of-publicity case, the majority makes a statement close to the issues here:

Wherever the line in particular situations is to be drawn between media reports that are protected and those that are not, we are quite sure that the First and Fourteenth Amendments do not immunize the media when they broadcast a performer’s entire act without his consent.

To me, 45 seconds constitutes quite a bit less than an entire act. However, there is a more interesting social angle to this story.

The NCAA, for example, recently generated controversy by booting a reporter out of the press box at a college baseball playoff game.

Beyond what is happening in copyright-like rulemaking, the NFL is able to enforce these extra-legal rules by social control.

Legal experts say the policies do not violate any laws, because the NFL is entitled to establish the terms of access to its privately owned facilities.

This appears to be true (unless interviews occur on public streets). It might be the NFL is able to hold news organizations to these limits because of an unstated understanding that they could loose access to coaches, players, and facilities if the limits are exceeded.

Control over copyright can be strong, but combining it with social efforts to control are often even stronger.