Does it really matter if there’s an extension of the CBA in July or a lockout? After all, there aren’t any games nor do players get paid during this summer.
But for the guys who are in charge of those team websites and NBA.com, the pending deadline is a huge deal.
That’s because the moment the clock strikes midnight on the current CBA, all those images and videos of NBA players have to disappear off NBA-owned digital properties. Depending on how you interpret “fair use,” the prohibition could include the mere mention of a player’s name on an NBA-owned site, though different teams have different interpretations of this particular stipulation.
Over the past few weeks, NBA website administrators and support staff have endured two-hour conference calls and countless planning sessions to figure out how to eliminate all these photos, highlights, articles and promotional features from the sites.
There are additional gray areas that are still up for discussion: What about a photo of a Lakers fan wearing a No. 24 Kobe Bryant jersey? What about a retrospective feature on the John Stockton-Karl Malone Jazz teams? Do tweets from the team’s official Twitter feed that mention a player and/or link to an image need to be deleted? How about Facebook posts?
Nobody seems to know for certain the definitive answers to these questions and the criteria seem to be arbitrary.
If there is a lockout, team website editors will have to remove all mentions of current players from their websites, which puts all the men and women who work on those websites in a major bind. As the article mentions, about the only thing team websites will be able to feature during a lockout are mascots, cheerleaders, and charity events -- but not charity events that mention current players. Just one more reason for fans to hope for a quick resolution to the NBA’s current labor situation.
