Re: Re: The Rights of Major League Baseball

Quoting "Agenbroad, James (Civ,ARL/CISD)" <jagenbro[_at_]arl.army.mil>:
> Admittedly, I'm on shaky ground here, because I can see no
> "bright line" between a football play and a figure skating
> routine.(which I DO believe is a work of authorship.)

You might distinguish them by the presence or absence of the competitors' input into the "script." That is, in figure skating, the skater may fail to do the routine as scripted, but at least there is some expectation that she will do it mostly as scripted. In football, you can have a play called, but you can only script what your own team does, not your opponents, and your team will go off script, based on the opponents' actions.

Of course, the argument above would put golf into figure skating's category, so maybe it does have something to do with the judging. Football refs are solely trying to determine the facts of what happened on the field, and the score is based on those facts (Rice caught the ball in the end zone). Figure skating judges go beyond the facts (Kwan pointed her toe in that spin in a way that made me feel passion), and score accordingly.

But even in the case of figure skating, new elements of programs introduced by one skater get used by other skaters. Thus, the Biellmann spin is used by more folks than Denise Biellmann (and, in high-jumping, the Fosbury Flop is now used by everybody), but I think it is accepted that any innovation in skating will be used by others if it is any good.

Keith Handley
kehandley89[_at_]alumni.amherst.edu Received on Fri Dec 12 2003 - 04:10:19 GMT