On Wednesday, I told you about the MySpace page of the Cubs' fansite/store Cubbie Baseball being shut down at the request of Major League Baseball. My gut reaction was to blame baseball for crushing fan interest yet again (I wasn't alone, you can check out the BBTF discussion thread of the incident here), but King Kaufman at Salon thinks I may have jumped the gun:The bigger problem here is MySpace, which summarily dumped the Cubbies Baseball page rather than asking McGraw to remove the offending logos and trademarks, which would have been easy for it to do and easy for him to do."We have an affiliate program that grants him a license to display and point to our shop using the [team] marks in that manner," says MLB.com spokesman Matt Gould. "In this specific case, that was granted only for his Web site."
I think this is a much more valid stance for Major League Baseball to have than I originally assumed. It seems harmless for Bryan McGraw to extend his license (and thus business) to MySpace, but allowing him to do so opens the door up for others with affiliate licenses to do so in a more harmful way.
On top of that, the MySpace page (the Google cache is no longer available, sorry) was designed in a way that someone viewing it without knowledge of what it was could easily be confused into thinking that it was actually the Cubs' page, and I don't have to tell you why neither the Cubs nor Major League Baseball would want that. It looks like, for once, MLB isn't the villain here after all.
Thanks to fellow 'Hauser Larry Brown for sending the Salon link along.
