Stop bitching and innovate

Extra-curriculars are optional, so fees are appropriate (and I would argue that htey should be mandatory).

Math, being a mandatory (and already funded) program, should not be charging any fees.

And any idea that the current economic and state budget situation changes those things is a discussion for other forums.

His teleconference bridge and a mutecast may not be quite analogous in legal terms, but they are very similar in terms of atomburns’ original idea as I understand it.

Anyone who has ever seriously participated in online gaming has probably used some type of VOIP program to communicate with their buddies, squad, clan, whatever. Consoles have their systems, and PC gamers have a couple programs to choose from, like Teamspeak and others. All you need is a server to host the channel and someone to setup a password and other entry requirements. In theory, there wouldn’t be any difference in setting up a channel for members of a baseball blog to use together while they watched games in comparison to setting one up for a bunch of clan members to use while they play World of Warcraft or CoD.

Like you point out, it’d probably be a lot tougher to take legal action against something like this too. It’s really more of a VOIP conference as opposed to a broadcast. A good buddy of mine calls me a lot during the season while he’s at work (sometimes multiple times a game) to find out what’s going on in the game that night. There’s no way MLB could go after something like that and a VOIP channel wouldn’t be all that different. If we really wanted to be safe, just have Moondoggy host the channel from Thailand or something. ;)

Your reaction when you read that should have been something along the lines of “Well, that’s absurd.”, which is why I used it.

The telephone conference consists of a number of individual parties using an electronic device consisting of a speaker, a microphone, and a connection to a public switched network who each use these devices to connect to a central audio service with the intent to communicate orally with any/all other parties. This function has been in wide use and fully supported, both by the consumer and within well-established legal standards, since the early days of public telephone service and “party lines”.

Now:
- for the electronic device we merely replace “telephone” with “computer”
- for the “handset” containing the speaker and microphone we substitute “computer speakers” and “computer mic”
- for the public switched network we replace “ma bell” with “ma internet”
- for the conferencing system we replace PacBell party lines or my personal “Verizon MyMeetings teleconferencing service” with “BlogTalkRadio”.
- and what we retain is “the intent to communicate orally with any/all other parties”
Therefore — directly analogous. And, yes, it is absurd to think that MLB would be able to squash that. I have little doubt that they would try, just to bully the little guys into some shy behavior favorable to MLB. But I cannot possibly see how they would actually win at trial.

As to your points about "any description of this event" and “all accounts”, well, I still insist that those apply to MLB’s descriptions and MLB’s accounts, not mine. For them to claim that they hold legal control over MY descriptions and MY accounts, they would have to presume the legal authority to silence me and my friends and family as we walk from the stadium to our car after a game. And they would have to claim that they hold legal control over my placing a phone call to tell my son halfway across the country about the amazing play that I just witnessed. And they would have to claim that they have the legal right to shut down my three-way phone call to join in my other son up in LA, so that we could all share in the excitement. And…oh wait…what do you know? There we are back at that teleconferencing point again, aren’t we?

True story: I used to work as the global Director of IT Ops for a very large law firm, which shall go unnamed here.

After the whole ENRON debacle a few municipal entities decided to sue a major, major energy company and reclaim what they felt were predatory energy fees for their rate holders. The potential exposure to this particular energy company was something like $3 – 5 billion, IIRC. My law firm represented the energy company.

After all was said and done, the court found in favor of the plaintiffs. For $500,000. And the defendants held a drunken binge for the entire defense team and a great time was had by all.

Just no voice. Pweese?