Unverified Voracity, Long Gone Comment Count

Brian

Where the great plains begin. It will not be news to anyone that Ernie Harwell died yesterday. I'm sure most have youtubed a tribute or three in the aftermath; there are plenty. A year-long bout with cancer gives people time to prepare. I think the best, tribute, though, was an improptu one: Dan Dickerson relaying the news on the radio. Clearly heartbroken, Dickerson provides a few seconds of dead air, then gets out a few tear-stained words before managing to interject "Hudson takes a pitch high." Jim Price hops in at this point and the two talk about Harwell as Hudson takes a five-pitch walk. That's baseball.

Here's some of Harwell in his own words:

The Detroit Tigers Weblog has a roundup of other tributes. Also, I wrote something for The Sporting News when news of Harwell's cancer broke.

Chicago, my nemesis, we meet again. After standing outside Hugging Harold Reynold's room with a boombox for months they've finally relented and allowed me to be on one of the panels at Blogs With Balls 3.0. The title of our panel is "Democratizing Sports Media: How Blogging Players, Fans & Leagues Are Changing the Game," and like a good engineer I'll be frantically attempting to make that less vague over email in the next month. Joining me will be Henry Abbott of True Hoop fame, Kevin Kaduk of Yahoo's Big League Stew, Valli Hilaire of The Fast and The Fabulous, which is not New York's gay and lesbian bike club even if Google thinks it is but rather a NASCAR blog, and Robert Littal of Black Sports Online.

Some cursory googling reveals that Littal is an Ohio State grad and Kaduk went to Wisconsin and roots for Notre Dame, so if things get boring I we'll just have a triple threat match for bragging rights. If you want to witness rough country justice firsthand, you can get tickets. They're 50 bucks off until May 15th. 

Zoltan, one last time. I read a lot of other college football blogs, so I state this with authority: we are living through a golden age in Michigan-football-related bizarre Youtube projects. There is not a school on the planet that can compete with Mike Cox getting it YGM style, Coner 2000 dropping mad rhymes (THAT'S FEBREZE PEOPLE) or killing some rich guy, Jack Kennedy auditioning for American Idol, O'Neill Depriest Swanson III pumping Vitamin Water, and Zoltan Mesko burning Meijer so hard:

Yea, truly we are the leaders and best.

JT Floyd would like to make cliches. Sometimes I feel deeply for beatwriters. This is one of those times:

J.T. Floyd’s motto as cornerback is simple.

“Make plays,” Floyd said last month after the Michigan football team's spring game. “That’s all you got to do to be successful out here.”

It's May. Football isn't until August. And you've got to publish something, so you grab an old quote in which a football player says "making plays" is the key to success. That article does have a couple encouraging quotes from teammates and coaches on Floyd, but… man. It's rough out there in May.

Other articles in this genre: Cam Gordon is a safety, Roy Roundtree is a receiver, and Obi Ezeh… actually, the Ezeh one has an admission from the man himself that last year was sub-optimal:

“It wasn’t my best year, obviously,” Ezeh said after the Wolverines’ April 17 spring game. “That’s in the past and try to move on and build a better future. I got to prove to people that last year was kind of a fluke and this is the (real) Obi.”

So there's that. Good luck in June, everyone.

Fightin' with facts. I don't believe I've mentioned the strange entity that is College Hockey, Inc. in this space, so here goes: USA Hockey finally got the same sort of giant developmental payment that the NHL has been forking over to the CHL for years. They spend some on the NTDP, some on the USHL, and some forming what can only be described as a propaganda organization called College Hockey, Inc. Its head is Paul Kelly and he's spent the year wandering around the country, advocating college hockey and pointing out that unless you're Patrick Kane the CHL is a rube's game. Kelly:

Our most important mission is to be an education and information resource to elite young players and their families on the many benefits of playing college hockey and why, if they're good enough and faced with the option to play for one of the junior teams in Canada or an NCAA Division I program, the option to play NCAA hockey is in most instances, the smarter and better course of action.

I love that there is an organization that causes CHL teams to complain about being "unfairly targeted" for pointing out relative graduation rates. Targeted, yes. Unfair… not so much.

Kelly also talks about future expansion of the USHL to a whopping 24 teams—Muskegon's picking one up this fall—and possible new markets for the college game. The great white sasquatch of the Big Ten is broached:

FTR:  Penn State has been kicking that arena idea around for awhile now, and they also have a very good club program.  Could they be next?

Kelly:  They have been talking about the arena project and if you could ever get one other school from the Big Ten, you could create a Big Ten Hockey Conference.  We'd have to shuffle the deck a bit, and reconfigure the WCHA and CCHA a bit.

I don't know how realistic any of these candidates are but if Penn State adds hockey I can't imagine it won't be at least revenue-neutral, especially if the Big Ten Network gets involved. Unfortunately, Title IX means a revenue-neutral men's sport can't be added without a women's sport that will be a money pit, and the economy and etc.

Kelly also suggests an Alaska-like exemption to keep Huntsville viable, something that I support.

Politics exception. There is one exception I will make to the otherwise iron-clad no politics law: copyright law is broken and stupid. Latest example is Google allowing the Downfall parodies to get yanked off Youtube when they could not be clearer instances of fair use. The precedent is worrying to me since I regularly post small snippets of a larger product I do not own for transformative purposes—ie, I employ fair use extensively. Here Google has failed to not be evil.

Etc.: I showed up on a podcast at Bucknuts. Warning: it looks like you have to register (but not subscribe) to get access to it. Also they make me state my opinion of Tressel, which I regret to inform you is respectful. Thus you are warned doubly. The hockey media's treatment of Alexander Ovechkin in the aftermath of the Caps' unceremonious first-round ouster is laughably inaccurate and totally predictable.

Comments

GoBlueScott

May 5th, 2010 at 12:26 PM ^

you have to warn people your opinion of Tressel is respectful.

Who doesn't respect him? He's not an arrogant sunbitch like Weiss was (is?) ... and he's not a moronic prick like Dantonio.

I simply hate him because he keeps beating us.

But I definitely respect him.

tacar

May 5th, 2010 at 2:19 PM ^

But there's something evil lurking below his 'front' - I just know it! His squeaky cleanliness comes across a little false to me. He is, no doubt, an excellent recruiter and coach though. My big fear now is that Brian Kelly turns out to be as good as Tressel and I have to hate him for beating Michigan too often (which is once).

JLo

May 5th, 2010 at 12:59 PM ^

Google isn't pulling the Downfall parodies because they're taking it upon themselves to enforce copyright law, it's to protect their own ass.  Hypothetically, every time someone posts a YouTube video that infringes someone's copyright, Google can be held liable for contributory infringment.  So they try to do a good job policing the videos to protect themselves, and sometimes they get a bit over-zealous. 

wile_e8

May 5th, 2010 at 1:15 PM ^

As far as I know about the DMCA, you have the right idea but the details are wrong.  According to the DMCA, they have safe harbor protection from copyright infringement if they are just hosting user submissions.  But if a copyright holder files an infringment notice, they *have* to take it down, or else they'll become liable.  So Google is just at the mercy of Constantin here.

Brian

May 5th, 2010 at 4:15 PM ^

The company in question has not sent Google DMCA notices. DMCA notices can be counter-noticed, at which point Youtube puts the videos back up and the parties can either go to court or not.. Youtube is fingerprinting the content and taking it down because it wants to play nice; it is not exposed to legal liability here, the uploader is.

bronxblue

May 5th, 2010 at 4:56 PM ^

The concern with youtube seems to be a growing willingness of courts to hold Google liable for the videos being posted on their site.  It used to be that Google could hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA and act as a passive carrier (like the phone companies and the ISPs before them).  But now, because of cases like the current one with Comcast, Google is being portrayed as a company well aware that youtube's value is in its violations of third-party copyrights (not that I agree with this characterization completely, but it is undeniable that youtube without move mashups and Family Guy/South Park clips is less of a destination) and has actively traded on those violations.  If a court ever rules that Google knowingly allows copyrighted material to be uploaded and could employ means to stop it, they might very fell be in the cross-hairs of some rather massive judgments. 

Personally, I think it is unrealistic to expect Google/Youtube to actively patrol every video being uploaded (last I heard it was something like 2-3 hours of video being uploaded every minute) and I agree that many fall under some fair use exemption, but at the same time I could see how a portion of the videos uploaded lack any of the characteristics of fair use and do injure the value of the underlying works.  To take a (somewhat exaggerated) example, the wedding video with the bridal party dancing to the Chris Brown song had millions of hits, and while those wedding participants had the right to use his song for the wedding itself, Google definitely benefitted financially from the advertising dollars traced to visitors of that video, money that was not (initially) shared with Brown.  Sure, charities were set up and the money was properly distributed, but if I was Chris Brown I could see being angry that youtube was profitting from my work without compensating me.

I agree that Google is activing preemptively, but at the same time they know that it only takes one bad lawsuit to open the floodgates - look no further than Microsoft if you want to see the types of judgments courts are willing to dish out to massive corporations.  Youtube is already a financial loser for google, and they need to be careful about turning this slow drip into a flood.

JLo

May 5th, 2010 at 5:53 PM ^

I guess Google's being proactive. I did a little research and came across this article, which gives a good summary of the whole Viacom/Google copyright suit.

It looks like that case is going to turn on whether Google's old policy (not actively policing, just waiting for notice from the copyright holder) is really sufficient for the Safe Harbor provision in the DMCA. They were complying with the letter of the law, because they were taking down videos as soon as they got notice. However, they weren't really abiding by the spirit - they were aware that large amounts of copyrighted material was being posted, but they counted on being safe because they didn't have specific knowledge of which videos were infringing on a copyright. (The relevant portion of the DMCA is here, look at (c)(1)(A).)

Honestly, this is really shitty for google. If they don't use this fingerprinting system, they're probably going to be liable for contributory infringement because of all the copyrighted material that gets put up. When they do police the videos, they're going to wind up flagging a bunch of content (like the Hitler videos) that's almost certainly fair use, so there would be no liability for it anyway.  They're choosing to err on the side of "please don't sue us."

Tim Waymen

May 5th, 2010 at 1:13 PM ^

Man I sure hope that those 2 girls in the Meijer video picked up some birth control in aisle 16 because Zoltan's been known to impregnate women just by looking at them, and last I checked he wasn't wearing condoms over his eyes.

Blue in Yarmouth

May 6th, 2010 at 8:01 AM ^

I played in the CHL for 4 years in my youth and what Brian says is true. If you are looking for an education the place to be is in the NCAA, not the CHL. I ended up in University until I was 34 because the CHL put no stock whatsoever in education. I basically did no school work from the time I was 16 until I left the CHL at 20. At that point (after not getting drafted or signed) I had to return to high school (at 20 years old) before heading on to University.

I know this is really my fault and can't be blamed on the CHL, but they certainly did nothing to encourage any of us to get an education.

What I find strange is that this is a very similar debate to one I had on this board before in regard to NCAA football. Many on this blog were advocating that players shouldn't have to go to university (or at least shouldn't have to qualify academically to get there) since they were trying to make it to the NFL and had little interest in the education side of things.

I argued that education was important and players should be made to get an education as well as play football (largely because of my personal experience in the CHL). Just like the CHL, many of the NCAA football players won't go on to professional careers so they would at least have something to fall back on.

Anyway, I don't want to rehash that debate, I am just curious where Brian stands on that debate since he obviously thinks education is important for hockey players. It would be hard to bash the CHL for their academic standards (or lack thereof) while adovcating that football players shouldn't have to go to university or should receive special treatment (academically) in order to get there.