Are You Kidding me Cincinnati!?!
Bengals have bigger issues to fight then taking on the entire free world
SCOTT JACOBS
I just read Mitch’s post about the Cinncinatti Bengals, and how they sent a cease and desist letter to one of their biggest fans, a blogger who ran the blog, Stripe Hype.
Call me crazy, but this could be the start of something huge.
The Bengals are clearly on the look out for not threatening blogs. So what else might be out there? Who else might be looking?
I look at this letter they sent as totally ridiculous, but this much is clear. The big mighty franchise is now feeling the wrath of the small blog. Do you know what this means? It means we just might be getting closer to what we want.
What do we want exactly? Well for many in the blogosphere, press credentials. If the Bengals had just handed those out to this blogger, and let him take the pictures and conduct the interviews he wanted then this could have all been avoided.
Seriously, what’s better: informed media or any man?
This is in the internet folks. If teams starting going after their logo packages, by god, I think google would be left bare. Could you imagine searching “Bengals logo” and the only thing that came up was pages from the team’s website? There are Bengals Myspace layouts. Surely someone’s going to get sued!
I honestly believe that the Bengals are taking on an army and a world with this ludicrous cease and desist letter. Why? Well, if you start fearing for your logo’s safety what is your next plan of attack, raiding the entire internet until black and orange is in nothing but Halloween?
And just for kicks, because the Bengals appear to be pricks, I think Halloween the holiday should sue the Bengals for their use of Orange and Black.
Seriously, this is ridiculous. The Bengals have their robots who write their perfect columns about that perfect team. But other fans on the internet see quite the opposite. So they voice it. And they use (gasp) Bengals colors and logos to emphasize and drive home their point and of course to visually enhance the site.
As Mitch noted, are they going to censor out our use of team names and player names? I think he actually didn’t go far enough. Why not censor out the cities too and simply place the longitude and latitude, because somewhere a city name has to be copyrighted.
If the Bengals PR guy is trying to get good attention for his bad (on the field and off) scrubs, dare I suggest some goodwill stuff, like allowing more people to have media credentials so that they can see what really happens inside the Jungle. O wait a minute, I think it’s clear how the Bengals are. Greedy and trying to run off the people who oppose their mediocre play. Hey Mike Brown! You can’t just 1984 the blogosphere. But you can look like more a schmuch then ever.
Now please Mike Brown, are you guys going to sue me too?
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It’s the legal team that’s behind this. Said blogger says that the PR team has been very nice about it.
btw, I’m interviewing the blogger on Friday for JSB
I’d like to say thanks to those who have kept the word out on the Bengals. Whether you agree or disagree, it’s good to see fans active. As for our use of copyrighted material, the worst offense we truly had was that I posed the NFL Draft Logo on one of my blog postings Otherwise, we used commercially available photos, and on the site we gave all copyright credit where due. I had been in touch with the Bengals PR Director over the last months showing him articles, interviews with players and readership of over 10k per month to attempt to gain some small level of access to the team. I wasn’t even looking for full media credentials, just a shot to come to training/mini camp one day and talk to players without having to go through their agents. They claimed we weren’t big enough, lol, so I started a campaign of Bengals Bloggers to ramp it up on them. Now, we have this letter. No call from the Bengals (they had my phone, email and postal addy) they simply sicked the NFL lawyers on us to tone us down. Well instead, I quit writing anything postive and I’m going to be on the Jim Rome show, and a few other places in the media to really spin the Bengals bad. They thought I was some in the basement in my undies moron who didn’t understand how media works. Now they see that I have a pretty good understanding, and yes, some of my responses have been juvenile and somewhat punk-ish to them, but that was orchestrated to get under their skin about other reasons and rile them up. It was worked.