Blogger Ejected From Baseball Game

SmartMobs points us to an interesting issue that came up when a blogger for a newspaper was thrown out of a baseball game for reporting it live to his blog. The Kentucky Courier-Journal says:

A representative of the NCAA baseball committee, approached C-J staffer Brian Bennett at the University of Louisville’s Jim Patterson Stadium in the bottom of the fifth inning in the U of L-Oklahoma State game. McArtor told him that blogging from an NCAA championship event “is against NCAA policies. We’re revoking the credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium.” . . . .

U of L circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA’s manager of broadcasting, before Friday’s first super-regional game. It said blogs are considered a “live representation of the game” and that any blog containing action photos or game reports would be prohibited. . . .

“It’s a real question that we’re being deprived of our right to report within the First Amendment from a public facility,” said Jon L. Fleischaker, the newspaper’s attorney.

“Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV. Everybody sees it. (The NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.”

Interestingly, we wrote recently that live content may be one of the rare pieces of content that content owners could still charge for. A blogger in this situation hardly endangered the media owner’s money making possibilities from their rights to the baseball game - in fact, he probably improved it. Nevertheless, will we see more attempts to keep bloggers out of live events as content owners struggle to control their content in a world of less or no control?