| Issue 359: August 15–August 22, 2002 |
| Amazin' Mess
Baseball fans with team-related sites are being accused of stealing home (page)
Time Out New York |
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Bryan Hoch was MetsOn-line.net before the Mets were on the Net. He started
the site as a 14-year-old fan in 1996, and when the Queens franchise built
mets.com several years later, he volunteered for an unpaid internship on that
site. In 2001, Major League Baseball took over all teams' official sites; Hoch
went back to covering the Mets on his own. Last month, the site itself was
served with an e-mailed cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Hoch shut
down his six-year labor of love and hand the domain name over to MLB—even
though the Mets organization itself likes the site. He's accused of
cybersquatting, but the facts suggest that he's guilty only of being an
overenthusiastic fan.
Cybersquatting originally meant the practice of buying a domain name and ransoming it off to a company or person that has a vested interest in owning it. For instance,in 1994 a reporter noticed that "mcdonalds.com" was available. He registered the domain name with the proper authorities and then contacted representatives of the burger company to tell them that he had "their" domain name, and would not give it up until they donated $3,500 to a Bedford-Stuyvesant public school. At the time, there were no laws governing such things; McDonald's tried suing the reporter and lost. These days, cybersquatting laws protect trademark holders from this and other, less benign forms of extortion. According to that definition, however, Hoch wasn't cybersquatting; he never expected to profit from the domain name itself. But Major League Baseball and other rapacious trademark holders have begun to use anticybersquatting laws as a cudgel to eliminate content that's not under their direct control. Hoch isn't the first baseball fan to feel the heat: In Texas, an Astros fan site (astrosconnection.com) showing the team logo merely in player photos was saved from deletion only when the Astros front office (ahem) went to bat for it. Meanwhile, true cybersquatters pass unmolested: Accidentally typing "metsonline.com" (as opposed to metsonline.net) takes visitors to an ad for namebargain.com, which invites anyone to make an offer to buy that domain name. The bidding, at press time, started at $200. Baseball isn't the only sport cracking down on potential cybersquatters. Just weeks after federal anticybersquatting laws were passed in 1999, base-ball banded together with the football, hockey and basketball leagues to sue a domain-name reseller for offering team-related e-mail addresses (à la bigfan@ gomets.com)—the online equivalent of vanity license plates. The leagues themselves now offer many such fan-friendly services. A Boston supporter, for instance, can go to MLB.com and get a free "@redsoxmvp.com" address. The leagues argue that only by controlling such domains can they protect their interests and reputation, not to mention their profits. The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, the 1999 statute MLB cited in its letter to Hoch, stipulates that a squatter is someone who registers a domain "with a bad-faith intent to profit." Hoch once made a whopping $16 selling merchandise with 'metsonline.net' printed on it; the merchandise has since been discontinued. Too bad, according to Ethan Orlinsky, senior vice-president and general counsel for Major League Baseball Properties; the young entrepreneur once upon a time sold stuff (however unprofitably) from a site that used the Mets name or logo, and for this the domain name must die. End of story. The ball clubs themselves, however, see things differently. Hoch says that the Mets didn't know about MLB's threats againstMetsOnline; indeed, he says that the team has been explicitly supportive, and quotes one Mets official as saying, "We hope you'll be able to keep on doing what you've been doing." Meanwhile, Orlinsky says that the team has been in complete accord with MLB throughout the situation: "We've been in contact with [team representatives] as far back as I can remember." In any case, it's the Mets organization, not Major League Baseball, that's likely to feel the wrath of fans. The flood of letters Hoch has received since announcing the site's demise has reverberated with sentiments such as this: "if [the Mets'] poorly run organization runs you off the Net, I will finally throw in the towel"--dire words for a sport still struggling to regain fan affection after the disastrous 1994 strike, with another potential work stoppage looming only weeks away. Since Hoch received the cease-and-desist order, the SUNY-Rockland journalism major has decided to take the site down permanently, and hopes that MLB will at least refrain from carrying out threats to sue him for "appropriate compensation." The good news is that he's not entirely off-line; after all the uproar, Hoch scored a sportswriting job at FoxSports.com—a nice break for a 20-year-old who took his computer on family vacations in order to keep his site up-to-date. Great for Hoch. Bad for Mets fans. © 2003. All Rights Reserved. Time Out New York |
Source: http://www.timeoutny.com/byteme/359/359.tech.opener.html