I know you're not all fans of media fandom. :) Some of you have little or no sympathy for those of us who have some hobbies that center around television and movies.

I've had discussions with people who feel, for instance, that there's a major difference between gathering around the water cooler and discussing what kind of planned-and-canned shenanigans characters got up to on a pretends-to-be-reality show last night, but infinitely loser-like to discuss the character development on an unashamedly fictional program that went off the air two years ago.

At this moment I'm torn between going off on a digression about ephemeral culture, something I mentioned briefly a couple of posts ago, and the desire to stay on track (for once).*

Anyhow.

One of the battles that media fandom faces is the possibility of lawsuits over copyright infringement.

All fandoms face copyright issues, but the matter is much more clear-cut in scrapbooking fandom (someone made the image, so they own it) or plagiarism cases (you published those 5,000 words last year, then the identical words appeared on her website last month). Issues are not so clear in knitting fandom (someone created the pattern, but you could easily recreate the identical pattern on your own, so there are gray areas), or amateur chef fandom (ditto for recipes--prove I didn't make up that recipe for chicken cordon bleu all on my own!).

But people who play fantasy sports are immune from copyright infringement. After all, it's just a game of a game and nothing they're using belongs to anyone else, if you lay aside the frequent bandying of team names, league names, and/or player names. That's the law.

A kind of triumph for free speech for all of us, don't you think?

I mean, I'm not all that sure about the citation that fantasy leagues are okay because discussing sports is of "substantial public interest" or whatever they said. Sounds to me like there might have been a flaw in the wording of the lawsuit or something.

On the other hand, for every million people who want to talk about how the Yankees are doing this year, only twelve losers want to talk about them in terms of fantasy baseball team performance so fantasy leagues aren't precisely interesting to a "substantial" number of people, but that's all to the good for those of us involved in media fandom, because if a million people are talking about what happened on Supernatural's season-ender but only twelve people are 'talking' about it in terms of mix-and-matching events (fantasy media viewing!) to suit themselves, then they'd be covered under the same ruling.

In recent years, corporations have been aggressively pushing the bounds of intellectual property — extending the length of copyrights to unreasonable lengths, for example, and patenting seeds. In the case of fantasy baseball, the courts have rightly cried foul.

And genes. They're patenting our genes, don't forget. I have never understood how someone could legally lay claim to a gene, something in wide public use that's in the public interest to leave in the public domain. What's next? Levying tribute on all newborns for daring to use patented material?

The biggest fantasy in this case was Major League Baseball’s claim that its fans should pay to talk about the game.

Non-media fans are agreeing with that sentence. How insane, to think you can charge people for what they say?*

Drat. After all that, I forgot where I was going with this. Except to say that I'm sure the fantasy football nuts would be freaked out to realize how much they have in common with the media geeks who talk tv.

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* I'll confine myself to saying that discussing drama--what rings true and what doesn't in popular entertainment and what it says about us as human beings and about the society that produces the entertainment--discussing drama and human nature seems to me to be a much more intelligent use of time than debating whether or not some would-be actor could have swung on a rope over a pit if he hadn't been blindfolded or whatever idiotic shenanigans they get up to on those not-at-all-reality programs none of which, I'm proud to say, I've even seen as much as five minutes of. (stops to breathe)

**Another digression successfully avoided--words can be copyrighted, so why can't you charge someone for saying "New York Yankees" or "Boston Red Sox"?