Monday, February 05, 2007

NFL Says NO to Church Parties!!!

Who the hell does the NFL think they are? Telling Churches they can't hold Superbowl parties!




Here Here Here Here Here Here

"The NFL sent a "cease-and-desist" order to Fall Creek(A Church in Indianapolis) in response to its planned "Super Bowl Bash."

The NFL even has a ban on showing the game on a screen larger than 55 inches.

Like some others have said, bars and other venues have parties (to make money on alcohol sales)with the game on and it seems to be all good with the League, but as soon as a (non profit) chruch wants to have a safe place for its parishioners to get together it's against the copyright law. That's bogus!

I don't think it's possible to infringe on a copyright law unless you have a revenue stream (or maybe it even has to be a profit) coming from the activity. And even so, there's no damages with out causing a loss.

The ban on these parties is what causes the loss. Think about this...

10 parties per medium size city averaging 200 people per church party in, say, 20 cities in all 50 states. That's 2-million viewers or 2.2% of the estimated viewing audience!

I don't think the advertisers would appreciate that too much.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bars and clubs pay a much larger fee for cable and directv access. Meaning more fees go to the NFL as is their "broadcast rights"

Churches do not pay for the right to show the game like the bars, so they do not have the right.

If they contacted the NFL prior to the game and paid for it they probably not be a problem. Otherwiase it is stealing.

Hey, is one of the 10 commandments "thou shall not steal" or does the church just pick and choose what they will obey like "thou shall not covet"

Unknown said...

While I understand your statement I think it is flawed logic. The game was on free tv (CBS) and so bars and clubs don't have to pay for it either.

I don't think churches would be violating the spirit of the copyright by showing the game because they are not a business, i.e., No money made on the use of the product.

It's a huge stretch to tell anyone they can't watch free tv anywhere or anyhow they want.

Anonymous said...

I am a senior pastor of a church (not in the USA), and I also have wanted to do something similar: show live sporting events at the church building, as an outreach service to our community. So I am in favor of this.

However, what we planned to do is to take control of the commercials- we'd fade out the tv networks' commercials and fade in our own short and witty teaching messages. Which mean, all those big budget advertizers would not get any value out of our particular audience.

Just something to think about. If everybody (bars, etc) did the same thing, in the long run, it could affect the economics of the whole.