Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

I can understand the video being pulled, though 99% of that has no cash value any more anyway.

Audio? How much music of any sort is NOT on YouTube? Everyone's acclimated. Bands have their own channel, you listen, watch the commercials or pay not to.

Maybe this music is out there, someone listens and decides to use some in a new project. Like SpongeBob SquarePants. Which I'm sure NFL Films made a nice chunk of change from. It's a win-win.

Set up a channel, or put it all on Spotify, get some money for it and people have what they want as well. The NFL won't because they won't pay a staffer to do the work, and they won't accept the work this guy did for free. Make a deal.

JuggernautJ wrote:I'm with Bryan on this one.
One cannot "own" history.

Nor should one be allowed to deprive millions of joy and education out of greed.
If the NFL wants to (reasonably) control the way their "property" is shared then let them do so.
If they just want to hoard their goods and make them inaccessible to the general public then they should get out of the way and let others spread the joy.
I have no truck with misers and hoarders.

Seriously? It's not about "owning" the history that's involved here, it's the visual and audio content. It belongs to somebody. The NFL has a right to hoard their property if they choose and they have no moral or legal obligation to share it if that's what they choose. We're not talking about want, we're talking about legality. The NFL invested money in the creation of that work, whether it's the audio or the video, or the game itself. What right do we have to take it from them without their consent? Hey, I really like your new garden hose and I want it, badly. Don't be a hoarder, just give it to me.

JeffreyMiller wrote:

JuggernautJ wrote:I'm with Bryan on this one.
One cannot "own" history.

Nor should one be allowed to deprive millions of joy and education out of greed.
If the NFL wants to (reasonably) control the way their "property" is shared then let them do so.
If they just want to hoard their goods and make them inaccessible to the general public then they should get out of the way and let others spread the joy.
I have no truck with misers and hoarders.

Seriously? It's not about "owning" the history that's involved here, it's the visual and audio content. It belongs to somebody. The NFL has a right to hoard their property if they choose and they have no moral or legal obligation to share it if that's what they choose. We're not talking about want, we're talking about legality. The NFL invested money in the creation of that work, whether it's the audio or the video, or the game itself. What right do we have to take it from them without their consent? Hey, I really like your new garden hose and I want it, badly. Don't be a hoarder, just give it to me.

Tell more about this hose you covet ...

JeffreyMiller wrote: The NFL has a right to hoard their property if they choose and they have no moral or legal obligation to share it if that's what they choose.

I would suggest we have very different ideas on the meaning of morality.
Why don't we just leave it at that?

Jay Z wrote:Maybe this music is out there, someone listens and decides to use some in a new project. Like SpongeBob SquarePants. Which I'm sure NFL Films made a nice chunk of change from. It's a win-win,

Didn't Sam Spence get screwed out of royalties for that, or at the very least, wasn't told that his music would be used in a kids show? I avoid reading the YT comments for his songs because it's just a string of moronic jackasses who quote verbatim segments of SpongeBob.

JeffreyMiller wrote: Seriously? It's not about "owning" the history that's involved here, it's the visual and audio content. It belongs to somebody. The NFL has a right to hoard their property if they choose and they have no moral or legal obligation to share it if that's what they choose. We're not talking about want, we're talking about legality. The NFL invested money in the creation of that work, whether it's the audio or the video, or the game itself. What right do we have to take it from them without their consent? Hey, I really like your new garden hose and I want it, badly. Don't be a hoarder, just give it to me.

I don't disagree with what you said. I just think in this particular situation, a middle ground could have been reached. It seemed like that was the way things were headed initially with Dave and NFL Films, but then the NFL or NFL Properties stepped in and shut everything down.

JeffreyMiller wrote:

JuggernautJ wrote:I'm with Bryan on this one.
One cannot "own" history.

Nor should one be allowed to deprive millions of joy and education out of greed.
If the NFL wants to (reasonably) control the way their "property" is shared then let them do so.
If they just want to hoard their goods and make them inaccessible to the general public then they should get out of the way and let others spread the joy.
I have no truck with misers and hoarders.

Seriously? It's not about "owning" the history that's involved here, it's the visual and audio content. It belongs to somebody. The NFL has a right to hoard their property if they choose and they have no moral or legal obligation to share it if that's what they choose. We're not talking about want, we're talking about legality. The NFL invested money in the creation of that work, whether it's the audio or the video, or the game itself. What right do we have to take it from them without their consent? Hey, I really like your new garden hose and I want it, badly. Don't be a hoarder, just give it to me.

As a fellow author, I agree with you in principle, but I intensely dislike copyright being used to keep content away from the public. The reason for copyright law in the first place is to encourage publication and dissemination by giving the creator exclusive rights for a period of time and using it to prevent publication and dissemination obviously violates that intent.

I'd like to see a provision that, if the copyright holder is no longer disseminating the content, someone else has every right to do it in their stead.

The NFL is firing at a gnat with a bazooka. If their crack legal team had taken the time to assess the actual harm Volsky's work was causing the almighty shield, they might have seen that the answer was a big fat zero. Volsky's work effusively celebrated the NFL and its legacy. It made football fans happy and more enthusiastic about the sport. It sounds like the person Volsky was initially in contact with understood that until he or she was shouted down. Yes, the footage and (some of) the music are the league's property. But that fact gives them great latitude in how they enforce their copyright. They had the option of restricting what Volsky used, or regulating/vetting his projects in some way. What they did instead reflects an entity that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Citizen wrote:The NFL is firing at a gnat with a bazooka. If their crack legal team had taken the time to assess the actual harm Volsky's work was causing the almighty shield, they might have seen that the answer was a big fat zero. Volsky's work effusively celebrated the NFL and its legacy. It made football fans happy and more enthusiastic about the sport. It sounds like the person Volsky was initially in contact with understood that until he or she was shouted down. Yes, the footage and (some of) the music are the league's property. But that fact gives them great latitude in how they enforce their copyright. They had the option of restricting what Volsky used, or regulating/vetting his projects in some way. What they did instead reflects an entity that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Just because it wasn't doing any harm doesn't give someone the right to take someone else's property and release it for their own personal gain.

What the NFL makes on the sale of their dvds is peanuts. It's a very small market and my thinking is they do it out of courtesy for their more ardent fans. I'll go out on a limb and say it was Steve Sabol himself that made that call after reading hundreds of fan letters about old NFL Films. When you go to their site to purchase they are very clear about the use of their footage, you need to contact their licensing dept to get approval for reproduction. Volsky could have at least directed his subscribers to where he got the material, "Everything you see in my videos can be purchased here (insert link)."