Carmelo Anthony, the young star of the Denver Nuggets, was severely punished for throwing a punch in a brawl at the end of a recent Knicks-Nuggets game. His 15 game suspension will cost him $640,000 in salary. (I’d link to the brawl, but the NBA demanded that youtube.com remove all clips of the incident.)
With Anthony having already been punished by the NBA, Northwest Airlines decided they needed to do their part as well. It turns out that Carmelo Anthony is on the cover of this December’s WorldTraveler magazine, which you find in the seat pocket in front of you when you fly on Northwest Airlines. The article details all the good things that Anthony has been doing to give back to his community.
But when you go to the online version of the magazine, Carmelo is nowhere to be found, suspended by NWA indefinitely. Instead you find “The Best of China.” To find Carmelo, you have to go back to the cached version at google, although even in that version I wasn’t able to link to the actual story that reports on all the good things he has done.
The main thing I wanted to link to in that article was a sentence that described how Carmelo had ratcheted up his off-season training regimen this year. In particular, it reported that Carmelo had taken up boxing in the off-season.
Little did he know how directly relevant that part of his training would be this season.
11 Comments
it didn’t look like the lessons were paying off
— punxlutI didn’t know they taught the hit and run in boxing
— cubsfan1984http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Knicks-Denverbra.mov
CrooksAndLiars, the liberal blog, has the clip.
— yahelcSo it’s quite illegal in the US to “overclaim” your copyright (such as sending a cease-and-desist when a copyright holder “should” have known the recipient’s use was a fair use). A 2 minute clip of the fight certainly strikes me as a fair use.
The NBA need not worry, though; I’ve never heard of the following clause being enforced!
“Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false…shall be fined not more than $2,500.”
— kevincureNow he can learn “punk” fighting from A.I.
— qualitygI never understood why this behavior wasn’t treated as a crime. We all witnessed an actual felony taking place, yet no one ever gets charged! What gives? Why does the fact that they happened to be playing basketball before the fight make it okay in the eyes of the law?
— oddToddWould the reaction be the same if he were a white player? Because he’s black we start hearing words like “thug” and “punk” — code words if I every heard them.
— BobHGreat point Bob H.
— creed10To follow up on BobH’s comment within the context of some commentary I read elsewhere in the last few days (where exactly, I don’t remember), there is an interesting difference in how public perception of fights in baseball versus basketball works out.
Baseball fights are discussed with an “oh those crazy kids!” air to them while basketball fights are memorialized as epic events.
I don’t think Carmelo Anthony fighting damaged his long-term credibility; I do think how Carmelo Anthony fought damaged his credibility. That was some of the fastest and most nimble back pedaling I’ve seen in ages.
In my mind, the harsh punishment for this fight points back toward the NBA’s leadership needing to do a better job of handling and directing the league’s identity.
— PMMI do agree that given its newsworthyness, the fight should have been Fair Use. I guess that there might be an argument in favor of copyright protection of the taping of the game - if the version on youtube was indeed from the network. But if not…
But the DMCA is set up such that it is advantageous for sites like youtube to error on the side of caution. As long as they have a procedure in place for accepting take-down requests, and then implementing them, they presumably fall into the DMCA ISP safe-harbor.
— Bruce HaydenI feel there’s a racial compenent to this whole thing that everyone’s forgetting. Had this been in a different sport i.e. baseball the headlines would not have been as great and the repercussions wouldn’t have been so severe (i.e. being suspended by a sponser)
— tolsor