My Opinion on MLB Copyright Laws

When it comes to YouTube & Major League Baseball, there's a zero-tolerance policy. With the National Football League, you can search for "Bo Jackson" and get hundreds of video clips. On the other hand, MLB has dedicated full-time employees looking for things like a 30-second clip of a fan catching a Greg Colbrunn foul ball in 2003. If you think that's an exaggeration, it's exactly what happened to a fan in 2009 when the fan tried to describe a game to a friend & Major League Baseball prevented the fan from doing that. Zero tolerance means zero tolerance.

Fine. I'll pay the stupid $3.99 MLB might want for a Mariners/Padres game from 2003. Nothing's for free, and Commissioner Rob Manfred's $25 million a year salary isn't going to pay for itself...

Here is what Major League Baseball is essentially saying to the small percentage of their fanbase who upload archived games to YouTube, only to see the video & YouTube channel deleted:

Not for sale. At any price. Scram! And if you find it, it will be scrubbed from existence.

However, I understand where MLB is coming from. It's a free market, it's their product, and they have a right to make money with it. I remember being similarly annoyed when vintage video games became available over the internet in ROM format a.k.a. illegal downloading. Nintendo kept shutting down sites that offered games that Nintendo wasn't selling anymore. It was beyond aggravating, and it didn't make sense if Nintendo wasn't going to sell their vintage games. Then years later, the Wii & Wii U came out, and Nintendo started selling those vintage games to play on the new system.

But does MLB really have a plan to digitize and upload the 100,000+ games that have been broadcast since the '60s? Is there really some sort of "Operation: Holy Crap Amazing" going on behind the scenes? If so, then this all makes sense. Something like that would make an incredible amount of money. If they keep the $1.99 pricing model that they currently have on the iTunes store for the games they do have for sale, MLB will be rolling around in liquid cash. I'm guessing that there's a plan to make a lot of games available. But there is also a theory that MLB wants you to give them your hard earned money.
I'm guessing it's not going to include the Mariners/Padres game from 2003. I'm guessing there's a good chance that I'll never be able to buy a random, forgotten game from 30 or 40 years ago. Maybe in a couple of decades, something will become available.
Until then -- and this is the important part -- how does the availability of such a game do anything but help Major League Baseball?
But until MLB Advanced Media realizes that a draconian zero-tolerance policy is something that only made sense in 2000 before the drunk monkeys in their office could figure out a better policy, I'm keeping this guy's YouTube channel a secret because if I were to send you the link to his YouTube channel the potential for MLB to infiltrate his site increases thrice fold!