AP Pulls Coverage of Ladies Golf Tournament Over Rights and Credentials Issues That Are Finally Resolved, But Sports Organizers Are Getting Progressively More Arrogant In Commanding What The Media Can And Cannot Do With Its Coverage

Philip M. Stone February 27, 2006

The AP position was very clear; “Any stories and photos produced by AP staffers belong to the AP.” But that’s not the way the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) saw it. The LPGA wanted access forever to the AP tournament photos for free, and even worse if the AP wanted to use those pictures itself in the future for editorial purposes it would need the LPGA’s permission.

The LPGA made its rules part of the accreditation paperwork for a tournament in Honolulu last week. The AP refused to sign, as did several other news organizations, and there was very little coverage of the tournament thereafter  except for the actual  scores for an event that should have gotten blockbuster coverage across the US as teenage sensation Michelle Wie started her professional tour career in her own hometown.

After a couple of days of negotiations, and very little coverage of Wie, the two sides said they reached an agreement that the media has unrestricted editorial use of the products they produce in covering the LPGA, and the AP agreed, as is usual practice, to limits being imposed on using the material for commercial purposes. With that, the AP sent correspondents and photographers out on the course.

Still to be resolved as this is being written is the LPGA’s demand that it has the right for free promotional use of material that journalists create at a LPGA event.

It’s a spat that FIFA officials in Zürich should take note of. FIFA, as part of its accreditation process for the World Cup Tournament in Germany this summer, is insisting that news organizations agree that  no pictures of any game can go on any Internet site until the match is finished, and even then the number of pictures will be severely limited. 

Talks to resolve that have broken down and media organizations are calling in the lawyers, the politicians, and letting FIFA’s commercial sponsors know that the promotion they may have hoped for from the world’s media for sponsoring the tournament may not be forthcoming.

Rights have become big business – to news organizations and to sporting federations.  In FIFA’s case, they will be operating a World Cup Tournament site in conjunction with Yahoo and they don’t want competition. In effect they have sold exclusivity rights that they didn’t really have nailed down beforehand, and unless common sense prevails they may well find themselves with a great web site but otherwise globally with limited non-broadcast coverage. Sponsors will not be happy and it is probably they, more than anyone else, who can probably talk some sense to FIFA officialdom.

Honolulu was really just a small taste of what could happen when sporting groups and the media clash.

Media organizations have always made a distinction between the editorial use of its photos and the commercial use of photos, and in contracts with their clients are careful to state that pictures may be used only for editorial purposes.  So the AP had no problem in agreeing with the LPGA that it had no objection to commercial limits on picture use. But it is a tricky area.

Several years ago Reuters splashed a great picture of tennis great Pete Sampras “kissing the net” on the cover of its glossy annual report. Memory fades on what that picture had to do with the company’s financial results – maybe it was just to show a great example of a Reuters photo – and everyone was very happy until a smart-ass executive in the media department asked out loud whether the company had actually gotten Sampras’ permission to use the photo, for this was no longer an editorial use, it had now gone commercial.

Well, that really got the in-house lawyers into a tizzy, particularly those lawyers who had so painfully been teaching media executives all about rights issues. Nothing was ever heard again officially on the matter, but that supreme news source of all news sources – the corporate grapevine – filled in what happened next.

Sampras was tracked down at a tennis tournament and shown a copy of the annual report and he was asked if he was okay with it. Apparently he thought it was really cool and he gave the thumbs up, and there was a huge sigh of relief from the lawyers.

But it might just as easily have gone the other way as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper learned recently in being ordered to pay €1.2 million to former German tennis great Boris Becker for violating his image rights.

 

 

 

And imagine the happiness at McDonalds headquarters if the Golden Arches could not be seen on the kids t-shirts

A Munich court found that the newspaper had used Becker’s image, without his permission, to promote a new Sunday edition. A dummy version of a front page with Becker’s picture was used on billboards, on television and in newspapers to promote the new newspaper. It was happening at a time when Becker, probably’ Germany’s leading sporting hero, was involved in a messy divorce -- his wife was not thrilled by his shenanigans in a cupboard at a London restaurant that resulted nine months later in the birth of a daughter, not hers. The judge said there was no doubt that the newspaper was trying to take advantage of all that publicity.

But most important is the ruling that Becker’s image had been used for commercial purposes in promotional material, and none of it with his permission. The newspaper had offered to settle for €20,000, Becker had sued for €2.3 million. It is a lesson that media organizations will neglect at their peril.

And as the FIFA situation simmers, it is interesting to note that even the Vatican has reaffirmed it knows better than to mess with the media. The Vatican has imposed copyright on papal announcements since 1978 and recently billed a Milan publisher nearly $20,000 for printing and selling works by Pope Benedict XVI. But the Vatican was at pains to assure the world’s media that whatever texts the Pope issues may be published as news without payment; the distinction being that only if those texts are used for commercial purposes then copyright comes into play.

One would think that if even the Pope understands the various rights of freedom of expression and dissemination for the media, and the benefits of having a friendly media relationship, then even FIFA, as powerful as it might think it is, should take a second look at what it is doing to really screw up its media relationships.

Guys, back to the negotiating table!

ftm Follow Up & Comments