NewsCorp Archive

While I am unsure why anyone would want to watch the World Series now that the Yankees stepped aside as a show of good faith, if you are a Cablevision customer, you will want to read on. Fox and News Corp. have been blocking access to Fox 5 and My9 in the NYC area. Cablevision calls the move by Fox and News Corp., “an act of corporate greed”.

Today Cablevision announced an offer to provide a full rebate so Cablevision customers can purchase the ability to watch the World Series online. The subscription is purchased via the MLB website and actually offers more than what you would get by watching on television alone. You can also watch via your Apple iPod, iPad or iPhone and there’s also the option to watch a variety of different cameras at any time.

Here are the details of the offer:

Offer for all Residential and Business customers who may or may not have previously subscribed to Postseason.tv. To receive $10.00 credit, proof of order must be sent in an e-mail to JerichoQA@cablevision.com, fax to 201-405-1804, or mail to Cablevision, Quality Assurance Dept., 200 Jericho Quadrangle, Jericho, NY 11753. Include the order confirmation e-mail from MLB.com Subscription along with subscriber name, address, phone number and account number. Proof of purchase must be submitted by 12/26/10. Allow 2 billing cycles to receive your credit. Cablevision employees are not eligible. Offer expires at the end of the World Series.

Alternatively, you could just stick a set of rabbit ears on your television and watch the World Series old school.

Rupert Murdoch’s interest in erecting paywalls around NewsCorp content and removing it from Google’s index is in the news seemingly daily.  And today, it looks like Google made a play to keep the Wall Street Journal and other NewsCorp properties in the index.  Mashable reports on the two changes, and the second one has interesting fair use implications:

Publishers now have the option to tell Google’s spiders to only crawl and index the “preview pages.” This refers to pages that display the first few paragraphs of an article on subscription sites like WSJ.com in order to entice them to pay for a subscription. If a publisher chooses to have spiders crawl their articles in this manner, they will be labeled with “subscription” within Google News.

If you don’t know what fair use is, there are four factors that courts look at to see if an otherwise infringing use of one’s copyright is “fair” and therefore non-infringing:

1. the purpose and character of your use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

For more, this Stanford guide is a good start — indeed, the bullets above are a direct copy from there — but if you can handle some legalese, you are best off reading a case.  I recommend Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books (”RDR“, for short), for two reasons: (1) it’s about Harry Potter and (2) it shows that fair use is not at all intuitive.  The case doesn’t apply here but it’s easier to slough through than most cases.

Continue reading “Google and NewsCorp Do the Fair Use Hokey Pokey” »