Mental Squatting: The Fight Over Content and its Manipulation
I do not play fantasy sports but to the tune of $500 million annually, many do.
For the uninitiated, fantasy sports lets those of us whose fantasy it is to play or otherwise be involved in professional sports to “own” a make believe team. The “players” on the team are any that belong to a professional league; and one builds a team by drafting and trading players just like real-life sports managers do.
The success of one’s fantasy team is based on the statistics that the real-life players generate throughout the year.
For example, if I played fantasy baseball, and Red Sox slugger David Ortiz was one of my big boppers, I’d apply his output during his last game along with the rest of the players on my team to generate a score. My opponent would do the same and the winner between me and my opponent would be the collected output that our fantasy players generated in their real world games.
As a side note I’ll add that that if Ortiz really was on my team, I’d be bummed since in real life he recently injured his wrist and has been placed on the disabled list. That means the man known as Big Papi is no longer generating for my fantasy world.
All this is to say that there’s fantasy baseball and fantasy football and fantasy golf, soccer, hockey and even cricket. Sports sites such as ESPN have whole sections dedicated to these fantasy worlds and grown men (yes, mostly men) will argue with life or death intensity over the supposed fantasy value of Player A versus that of Player B.
With 18 million people in the States participating, and numerous sites charging or otherwise monetizing this participation, there’s a lot of money to be had. And for those following the business of all this, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association want a cut of the action.
However, earlier this month, the Supreme Court essentially ended a three-year legal battle between MLB and fantasy sports providers. The case is made bite-sized by Salon’s King Kaufman:
MLB Advanced Media, baseball’s lucrative Internet arm, had refused to renew a license for a St. Louis company called CBC Distribution and Marketing, which runs fantasy leagues. MLBAM, in partnership with the players union, planned to run its own fantasy games at MLB.com, and restrict the number of licenses it granted to a small number of other large sites.
CBC sued, arguing that ballplayers’ identities and stats are in the public domain. Baseball’s argument was essentially that a player’s stats, in connection with his name, are a part of his unique identity just as his face is. It’s not a ridiculous argument, but it lost.
While most reported this as a business and/or legal story, what’s overlooked in the details are two ideas I believe much more interesting, and much more important as well.
First is the entire idea of what content actually is. The second is what happens to content once we figure out what the answer to that very important first question.
Content is a mysterious game. We think of television programs, books and paintings as definitely and deliberately content. It’s something we read, watch and look at. But thinking this way confuses the delivery medium (a film) with the medium itself.
It also leads us to overlook the bits and bytes of our digital culture. For example, the code that creates the software that creates this Web site is content, legible and understandable to those who speak the language. Go through the many files of code that come together to create the page you’re reading these words on and you read a blueprint rather similar to what an architect creates when thinking a building.
Major League Baseball’s argument was fought over the very question of what content is, and who controls it. In their view, generated statistics are part of the sum total of content generated by any given game.
The fact that the New York Mets’ Pedro Martinez pitched 6 innings, struck out 4, walked 2 and gave up 3 earned runs is a fact MLB wants to claim as their own. In essence, they’re saying, these stats are content we’ve created and can assign value to just as this or that painting that hangs in a gallery was created through actions of a painter and is now content with an assigned value. Our content, they appear to say, is not merely the game, or the televised reproduction of that game, but the historical facts, figures and statistics that the game generates as well.
In our day and age where content is simultaneously long-form king and and short-form pauper, there’s a land grab going on by very smart people hoping to monetize both.
Or, perhaps I should say, a mind grab.
That is, while many struggle to figure out business models for content — with even venture capitalists arguing that content itself will eventually be free — all tend to believe and understand that owning or controlling content is in some way very, very important. And lucrative.
And so we see organizations like MLB and the Recording Industry Association of America pushing outwards to lay greater claim over what’s traditionally been seen as their rightful property.
I call this mental squatting, the deliberate attempt to expand one’s hold on content and ideas outwards into the public sphere through copyright, patents, and redefining what the boundaries of content are to begin with.
This is not to say that copyright, patents, trademarks and the like don’t serve an important purpose. Instead, mental squatters attempt to expand their private rights against the commons by making things like copyright ever more stringent, ever more exclusive, and ever more punitive to those who they believe infringe upon them. And if we spin out the MLB argument that the historical results of their games constitutes their content as opposed to being part of the public record, we stumble upon some absurdities.
For example, should newspapers license the right to publish stats from previous night’s games? Should Michael Lewis have licensed the right to use stats when he wrote Moneyball, the much quoted book on managerial innovation in the Major Leagues? Should the cottage industry of statisticians and hard core fans license stats from MLB if they want to publish a comparative study of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and my now injured David Ortiz?
I don’t think so either.
But this is just one example of many that revolve around issues of how content is created, distributed, bought and sold.
It was just the other day that the Associated Press tried to determine how bloggers could quote and attribute them, and just last month that Malcom Gladwell celebrated a group that kicks back, thinks big ideas and then files patents on them in search of future revenue.
And it will be tomorrow, the next day or the next that we have another battle between corporations and the public over who has control and rights over the creation, manipulation, distribution and monetization of ideas, culture and technology.
Stay tuned. There’s squatting in the public commons but there’s still ambiguity over where those commons begin and end.
Michael Cervieri is Executive Producer of ScribeMedia.Org and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Haw haw AP –> http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/17/latest-tech-news-fro.html