so i just could not resit posting this ,
even though it is more techno , than political --
but its BaseBall and that is all that really counts.
It is also really very interesting.~~`
Major League Baseball awarded geolocation patent
Major League Baseball has won a patent for technology that blocked certain fans from viewing local games online, and it may open the door for the U.S. sports league to profit by licensing it to media companies.
Baseball's advanced media business was awarded a U.S. patent last month for online geolocation technology, a system that uses two or more electronic methods (such as wireless and satellite) to pinpoint the geographic location of a subscriber, the sports league said in a statement late Thursday.
The sports league filed for the patent, its first, in 2004 as a way of excluding certain fans from watching its games streamed live online.
MLB wanted to block reception of games in a subscriber's local market as a way of protecting the hundreds of millions of dollars its 30 clubs receive in rights fees from such regional sports networks as the New York Yankees' YES or Boston Red Sox's NESN.
"This was a clear example where necessity really was the mother of invention," Bob Bowman, chief executive of baseball's advanced media arm, said Friday in a telephone interview.
Baseball now could approach any company using multiple geolocation technologies to determine a subscriber's location and ask for a licensing fee, analysts said. The other options would be for those companies to try to work around baseball's patent or challenge it in court.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090515/tc_nm/us_baseball_patent
