Clips of NBA fight disappear from YouTube
Last Saturday night, the Denver Nuggets and New York Knicks engaged in a nasty fight near the end of a blowout win by the Nuggets at Madison Square Garden. Replays of the brawl, which resulted in a 15-game suspension for the NBA's leading scorer Carmelo Anthony, were plentiful on TV afterwards and quickly found their way onto YouTube. Just as quickly, the YouTube fight videos began disappearing.
A search for the brawl on YouTube made just prior to publication yielded a handful of videos. Most of them, such as "Rumble in the Bronx," have vanished from the site and have been replaced with the following message: "This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner National Basketball Association because its content was used without permission." A couple of videos posted more recently are still up, but may not last much longer.
The disappearance of the videos looks like a clumsy image repair attempt on the NBA's part. There are countless other clips from NBA games still up, along with user-created highlight reels set to hip-hop music, so it appears that unlike other pro sports leagues, the NBA isn't terribly concerned with copyright infringement when it comes to fan-generated content.
Is it just damaging footage the NBA is bothered by? Could be, but there is still plenty of footage from another famous NBA donnybrook. A search for "Pacers Pistons" turns up plenty of footage from the notorious November 2004 melee involving players for the Indiana Pacers, Detroit Pistons, and some members of the crowd.
The NBA is extremely image conscious. Before last season, the league issued a handful of new rules for players, including a dress code for players not suited up for games or attending league or team functions. While it's possible, albeit difficult, to exercise a degree of control over television and print media, the Internet is a different animal. Once something harmful or damaging is uploaded somewhere, it will be copied, mirrored, and cached. It is possible to make undesirable material more difficult to find, but eliminating it altogether is another matter entirely. That makes attempts at retroactive damage control over the Internet very problematic.
:source: Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061221-8474.html
