Media & Entertainment Law

Congrats to the University at Buffalo

Posted on December 07, 2008
Congratulations to the University at Buffalo for beating Ball State, winning the MAC championship and securing their first ever trip to a bowl. The Bulls received and accepted a bid to the International Bowl in Toronto immediately following their 42-24 victory last night...

WNBA Folds Comets; A Victim of Recession or the League?

Posted on December 07, 2008
The Houston Comets were once the face of the WNBA, the league's first dynasty. Winners of not just the first WNBA championship, the Comets went on to win the next three. They were the sport's first dynasty, the WNBA's Boston Celtics. Not just champions but fun to watch and inspirational to boot...

How to Steal a Hockey Team: Boots and the Preds, a Match Made in Court

Posted on December 06, 2008
William Del Biaggio III was a man with a lavish lifestyle, a fixture at NHL events around the country and someone who for years had tried to buy a hockey team. He negotiated a deal to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins with his "friend" Mario Lemiuex back in 2005, but that deal never materialized...

Update 101 on the Cubs Auction

Posted on December 03, 2008
So numbered for the nmber of years now and counting since the cubs won the World Series, comes news from the Deal Journal of the bids received by the Tribune Company for the Cubs. Confirmed bids were received from Tom Ricketts, the son of the founder of TD Ameritrade; Hersch Klaff, a Chicago real estate investor; and a partnership of two New York private equity moguls, Marc Utay and Leo Hindery...

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Hope for Online Gambling's Future?

Posted on December 02, 2008
As many of you no doubt are aware, the US Justice Department has been on a multi-year campaign to demonize and criminalize online gaming by targeting the owners of gaming sites and the owners of the financial intermediaries that handle the money transferred between the bettors and the gambling sites...

Blog Display Fixed (I Hope)

Posted on December 02, 2008
After many months of semi-serious attempts at fixing the way the blog displayed, I sat down this morning for some heavy duty coding time.  It now appears that it displays properly in both Firefox and Safari, so I presume it also works in Explorer, for you poor folks who still use it...

Will the Mets Ever Play in CitiField?

Posted on November 25, 2008
Anyone interested in taking bets on whether the Mets will ever play in CitiField scheduled to open this spring? While the Mets and Citigroup still say that there is no change in their 20 year, $400 million naming rights agreement, the latest federal rescue plan certainly places that commitment in doubt...

NCAA Hammers Sampson; Lets IU Skate

Posted on November 25, 2008
The Indiana University/Kelvin Sampson infractions case was resolved today with an announcement by the NCAA infractions committee of the penalties it had decided to hand out to IU, Sampson and former IU assistant coach Rob Senderoff. The NCAA, despite finding IU guilty of failure to monitor Sampson, which is the most significant (or the slightly watered down version) finding it can make against a university, accepted the university self-imposed sanctions...

Impact of the Recession Cont'd - GM

Posted on November 24, 2008
In a move that should have surprised no one, Buick and Tiger Woods announced today that they are terminating their longtime endorsement agreement one year early. The agreement was scheduled to expire on December 31, 2009 but will now terminate, by "mutual agreement" this December 31...

100 Blogs That Will Make You Smarter

Posted on November 20, 2008
The Online Universities blog has just posted a very interesting and highly informative list of blogs that is titled, if you couldn't tell from the title of this post, 100 blogs that will make you smarter. I am very proud to say that SportsBiz made this list in the sports category together with a very diverse group...

Impact of the Recession Cont'd - Golf

Posted on November 20, 2008
Golf has long been considered to be one sport which would be untouched by a recession. Images of freshly cut fairways and well tended greens with rows of electric carts surrounding a beautiful clubhouse just don't give the appearance of a sport that will have problems in an economic downturn, and in past recession that was indeed the case...

SEC Charges Cuban with Insider Tradiing

Posted on November 17, 2008
How much money does a multi-billionaire need? Apparently, at least another $750,000. That's the amount the Securities & Exchange Commission believes Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban avoiding losing by dumping all of his Mamma.com stock one day before the company announced it had concluded a successful private offering of its stock...

More on Cuban and the Cubs

Posted on November 16, 2008
Interesting column from Harvey Araton in today's Times on Mark Cuban's attempt to buy the Cubs. I don't know how much Cuban wants any other team although he did once make a run at the Pirates. He would probably did a good job at resurrecting that franchise which sorely needs it...

Impact of the Recession Cont'd. - GM

Posted on November 16, 2008
Further to my post of the other day on the impact of the recession on Super Bowl advertising, take a look at this article in today's New York Times on GM's pullback from sports advertising and sponsorship. Nice of the Times to finally weigh in.

British Open Moves to ESPN in 2010

Posted on November 14, 2008
The transition of major sporting events to cable TV that I wrote about the other day is happening faster than anticipated. ESPN and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews announced that beginning in 2010, all four rounds of the British Open, along with the Senior British Open and the next two Walker Cups will be shown on ESPN...

Impact of the Recession Cont'd. - Super Bowl

Posted on November 13, 2008
This is another in our continuing series of the posts on the impact of the global economic crisis on sports. Regular readers may have noticed that I have changed the title of these posts from impact of the credit crisis to impact of the recession. It's not that I think the credit crisis is over, although credit is clearly beginning to loosen up, it's just that there is no longer any doubt that we are in a recession and that it is likely to continue for at least the next three quarters...

Court Orders NFLPA to Pay $28.1 Million to Retired Players

Posted on November 13, 2008
The men who made the NFL what it is today, that is those who toiled in the 1950s and 1960s in the era before the giant contracts, seem to have been forgotten by those who have enjoyed the spoils of their labors. Oh sure, the late Gene Upshaw, the former head of the NFL Players Association used to speak warmly of the past generation of players and did make some changes to the retirees disability plan that has had beneficial effects...

BCS Moving to the Worldwide Leader??

Posted on November 12, 2008
According to a story in today's Sports Business Daily, the BCS Commissioners are considering a proposal from ESPN/ABC which would see all four of the BCS bowl games now under contract to Fox move to ESPN. The Rose Bowl has a separate contract with ABC, however a clause in that contract provides that if one of the BCS bowls move to cable then ESPN/ABC has the right to move the Rose Bowl to ESPN...

Are You Ready for Bevo TV?

Posted on November 10, 2008
First came ESPNU, an all sports network devoted to college athletics. It was followed quickly by what is now called CBS College Sports. Both have wide distribution thanks to the ability of their corporate parents to leverage their popular channels to force cable systems to carry the college sports networks if they wanted to get ESPN or any of Viacom's properties such as Showtime...

Looks Like No Cuban for the Cubs

Posted on November 09, 2008
Published reports are that the sale process for the Chicago Cubs is proceeding more slowly than Tribune owner Sam Zell wanted or expected. Even before the credit crisis, Zell had hoped for a quick sale so that the proceeds could be used to pay down some of the crushing debt load he incurred in the Tribune Company buy-out...

Sports and the Ballot Box

Posted on November 05, 2008
Aside from the historic nature of last night's election, and that is not something that is easily forgotten or should be something easily set aside, there were several former athletes on ballots across the nation. Most fared well. The most prominent was probably Kevin Johnson, the former All Star point guard of the Phoenix Suns, won election as Sacramento's first African-American mayor by defeating two-term incumbent Heather Fargo in a run-off election...

The Run to a Billion

Posted on November 04, 2008
For Tiger Woods, 2008 was a year unlike any other. Oh, in some respects it was the same. He finished the year on top of the world golf rankings and led the US in both Ryder Cup points and Presidents Cup points. He came in second in the money list with $5,775,000, despite not playing after June 15, and oh, yeah, he won another major - this time the US Open at Torrey Pines...

Newark to Devils: Pay Up or Else

Posted on November 04, 2008
It's only been a year since the New Jersey Devils moved into their new Newark home at the Prudential Center, but relations between the Devils and its landlord have already gone straight into the toilet. The Newark Housing Authority, the owner of the Pru, has issued a demand letter to the Devils declaring the team in default of its lease of the stadium and demanding immediate payment of $2...

Impact of the Credit Crisis Cont'd.

Posted on November 02, 2008
The common wisdom has always been that sports would be immune from most of the gyrations of the American economy. Unless there was a depression on the order of the Great Depression, then the impact of a recession would be fairly minimal. After all, Americans still want their entertainment and watching televised sports is cheap...

Will the NCAA Finally Find Teeth?

Posted on November 02, 2008
On Thursday, the NCAA Board of Directors heard recommendations from the Division I Committee on Infractions that would significantly beef up the penalties that the heretofore toothless NCAA would levy against member schools found to be violating the myriad rules in its several inch thick rulebook...

The Making of the OKC Thunder

Posted on October 29, 2008
In honor of the opening of the NBA season, be sure to check out the article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine relating the saga of the creation of the Oklahoma City Thunder, or if you prefer, the hijacking of the Seattle Sonics to OKC. It's an interesting take on the story.

Kentucky's Governor Goes All In

Posted on October 29, 2008
I've been meaning to write about this amazingly ridiculous and downright scary litigation for some time but for some reason, just haven't gotten around to it. In case you haven't heard about it before now, let me fill you in briefly on what Kentucky's hypocritical Governor has been up to...

Curlin's Co-Owners Disbarred

Posted on October 25, 2008
Since today is Breeders Cup Day, I would be remiss in not updating the story of Curlin's minority owners, the lawyers who fraudulently diverted millions of dollars from their clients in the settlement of a class action arising out of the diet drug commonly known as fen-phen...

Rutgers In Search of Naming Rights Sponsor

Posted on October 24, 2008
We should be getting a good indicator of the impact of the global credit crisis and the global recession on sports fairly soon. Rutgers is in the process of expanding its football stadium and, in conjunction with the expansion, is seeking to sell the naming rights for "somewhere in the $1...

Moneyball to be a Movie

Posted on October 21, 2008
Looks like Billy Beane is slated to become not only a baseball sensation but a Hollywood screen idol. Moneyball, Michael Lewis' popular look at the use of statistics to run a baseball team, specifically the Oakland A's is being made into a movie. According to Variety, Columbia Pictures is putting together a movie focusing on Beane and based on the book as a potential starring role for Brad Pitt...

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