You, who spent nothing on it and contributed no labor to it, don’t own THEIR footage, obviously.
The players who are the subject of the work already signed their rights to that footage away (presumably voluntarily for millions of dollars), so there’s no issues there.

The question is (as you allude to) what’s fair use.
If you bootleg a concert, do you own that recording?
Or can I film a game from the top of a building across the street, or a hot air balloon? Would I then be the author and own that video? [In anarchy, yes, of course.]

How much can you show of their clips and still be fair use?

Discarding between-innings stuff, the game itself might be 120 minutes. If you only count when the ball is in play (when game events generally occur, i.e., when it’s legal to steal a base and ), it’s far less than that, maybe 90 minutes.
So 30 seconds of a 100-120 minute game might be 0.4% of the entire work.
How many paragraphs in a book? Let’s say 1000. So if you reprint 2 paragraphs of 1000, that’s 0.2%.
Seems more than fair.

What I wonder is…what if it was a murder mystery and all you quoted was the 2 paragraph whodunnit conclusion of the book?
What if all you showed was the scoring in a 1-0 game (taking 30 seconds or less)? Isn’t that 100% of the whole “game” in one sense?

P.S. U.S. IP law is crap. That should go without saying.

You might be tempted to respond that Major League Baseball itself is the author. But that mangles the definition of “author” beyond recognition. MLB is the exhibitor. There is no author, because one cannot “author” a spontaneous live exhibition.

Their defense of copyright in this case may be a form of Labor Theory of Value argument – they are not being creative in any way but they invested substantial amounts in the TV equipment, salaries, etc. Therefore (they would argue) they “must” be owed money by anyone who manages to watch any part of the show that they produced. They would of course argue for the price to be based on the amount of their investment, and not on the price which most people in the market would be actually willing to pay – especially the people at the margin who are merely consuming highlight clips on a casual basis who probably would be willing to pay exactly $0 for the privilege.

Also, this barrier keeps out some people who aren’t serious or might just join to be disruptive. You might pay to disrupt, but it’s a lot less likely.

LvMI many times puts out the video of the first lecture and commonly posts some of the presentation material. And of course almost if not all the books used in the classes are made freely available.

I’m not quite in a position myself where I’ve been able to attend a class, because until recently I was the only one working. So I understand your argument about our price elasticity of demand. It’s certainly not that I wouldn’t like to attend some of the classes, but I don’t mind waiting until I feel a little better about my personal circumstances.

One interesting aspect of MLB’s absurd policy is how they are hurting their game. Take as contrast, the NBA’s approach to video highlights. Not only can you find highlights from the NBA posted instantly on YouTube, but you can watch ENTIRE past games on YouTube. Want to relive the Lakers-Celtics clashes of the 1980′s? They’re on YouTube. Game 5 of the 1993 Bulls-Knicks series (the famous Charles Smith game?) On YouTube, in its entirety.

The NBA has embraced the digital revolution. The MLB has fought it. It’s no surprise that the NBA’s popularity among the youth, not only in America but globally, is surging, while the MLB is suffering.

Recently, NBA commissioner David Stern was on a podcast hosted by ESPN’s Bill Simmons. Simmons, taking the usual economically-ignorant approach, wondered why anyone would go to a game anymore? There are HDTV’s, Internet packages, streaming highlights, etc.

Stern said he used to feel the same way, but now he realizes that the live game is actually a different product. Ha! He sounded like Jeffrey Tucker schooling us on ebooks versus traditional books!

So keep up the great work. Your analysis of the NFL lockout was fantastic and I have heard nothing close to it at my usual stops, even the hardcore sites.