AFL: Fans help not hinder!

ByLaurel Papworth

Michael Specht found this one on the Real Footy: The AFL has given a bunch of self-confessed football loving ‘IT geeks’ seven days notice to remove any references to the AFL, images or the mention of associated football league clubs from their footy blog. The blog contestedfooty.com – set up by seven footy-obsessed students from…

Michael Specht found this one on the Real Footy:

contestedfooty

The AFL has given a bunch of self-confessed football loving ‘IT geeks’ seven days notice to remove any references to the AFL, images or the mention of associated football league clubs from their footy blog.

The blog contestedfooty.com – set up by seven footy-obsessed students from Deakin and Monash universities – provides commentary on matches, players and footy news.

One of the site’s founders, 21-year-old student James Rose, told The Age the group received a letter from the AFL’s legal counsel demanding they stop using AFL intellectual property, stop displaying AFL images without their consent and provide evidence that they have ceased to do so by this Wednesday.

I love this comment:

“To me that’s a bit ridiculous, I’m not sure on the exact legality of it, we’re completely content with taking down images and we’ve put a lot of work in and then to turn around and say we can’t use their (the football club’s) name, what are we supposed to say the red, black and white team?” Mr Rose said.

Football would be great if it wasn’t for Fans dirtying up the brand. I mean, if they were all supermodels, wearing hats and T-shirts, we’d turn a blind eye, right? But students chatting about footy on a blog? Never!

And the 20 bucks they make towards hosting costs, doesn’t count. Not enough to cry foul anyway.

14 Comments

  8. Hey,
    Thanks for the support, everyone has been amazing.

    We are trying to get the article up in diggs ranking to get the word out.

    http://digg.com/other_sports/AFL_contests_fan_blog_site

    Just wanted to clarify we have made $10 off advertising over the 6 month journey and had costs of about $30 just for the domain, before you look at other costs.

    definitely not making a profit.

    now to be sure we have taken down adsense so we’ll see what happens.

    Thanks again for your support.
    James

  9. To play devils advocate. Do we know if the letter was about the images that use to be on the site or the actual names of clubs being used? My understanding from the article (and a little inside knowledge talking to the website owner) it was more about the images. As put in the article:
    —————-
    “So it’s use of anything that’s got an AFL logo, be it club guernsey or AFL images.”

    “People can do it but they can’t attach any commercial gains to it,” Mr Keane said
    =====================

    So just on that, can we at least stop claiming the AFL are trying to stop people saying “AFL” as they are on places like Twitter.

    Now the images that CF used that weren’t theirs I understand the copyright issue. The ones that they had the Copyright or permission from the Photo owner would be an interesting issue. Would love to hear from a Copyright Lawyer on that issue.

    I also have heard rumors that Telstra play an extremely large part on this issue.

    JMTC

  10. @molly: Love the fact you are looking at the issue properly but to clear some things up.

    The images we used were taken by us.

    And the e-mail started out by telling us we couldn’t use AFL or Club names without permission.

    1. Did they say you couldn’t use them or did they point out that they owned the trade mark on them?

      Don’t get me wrong, I wish they would be more open about it and as I said above would love the legal answer on Photos people take but (and Patrick Keane says it in the article) it doesn’t seem they can stop you using the names in an article.

      Image if you could. No more negative stories using a club name as the AFL would invoke copyright over the use on that occasion.

      Lets hope the Senate spend more time sorting this out rather then Spending time in the AFL’s business over where they have teams!

      Phillip Molly Malone’s last blog post..Video – Patrick’s 8th year

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