I was just looking at ESPN's boxing material 4 a while, and was totally disgusted by how limited their boxing material was. If the guy u were looking up didn't fight Ali or Tyson, he pretty much wasn't on their site. That always pisses me off.
ESPN is a corporate hero worship nonsense network They just put this special on Kobe on where you would think he solved world hunger and had magic powers .... Dude was a basketball player he bounced a ball and shot it in a basket ... He was an adulterer and possible ****** ... The American public has a laughably low IQ
Espn is garbage and bad for public consumption. Race baiting and woke nonsense 24/7 and has been that way for long long time now.
It's part of the American mainstream media The same mainstream media that has been pandering and provoking all kinds of nonsense and immortalizing those who fit their narrative. I remember one time they had a segment on the best athlete couples (what does that even mean?) and they had Jay Z and Beyonce number one on the list ... I don't recall either of those two ever playing any sport on any level ... Amateur or professional ... Literally feel my IQ drop when they have those idiots blabbering away ... Especially Screaming A Smith ... ESPN is unwatchable now and poisonous to the mind
You guys have to understand that ESPN doesnt own the rights to the vast majority of fights out there. They have no legal authority to broadcast whatever they want. They purchased the Jim Jacobs collection but despite what Jacobs often claimed he did not own the rights to the vast majority of films in his collection. And for what its worth they dont own Tiger-DePaula.
So was Jacobs being deceptive? Well, I did just hear it. I never could find anything else that said that, so I just treated it like a rumor.
Jacobs used to file a lot of derivative copyrights on his films as a means of trying to claim and maintain ownership. For example he would take a film of a fight, add new titles, narration, sound etc and then file a copyright on it. These derivative copyrights are so called because they derive from a previous work. The only thing that Jacobs could legally copyright in such a production would be his new titles, narration, sound etc. Not the actual original fight film. However, going through the copyright rolls you can see numerous examples where Jacobs would file a copyright on a film 50 years after it was filmed and long after the person who owned the copyright could have possibly sold it to him or in a lot of cases long after the copyright passed into the public domain. Simply slapping a derivative copyright on something doesnt mean you own it. However, it did, on the face it, allow him to claim a copyright in relation to his films and thereby scare away a lot of people who didnt have pockets anywhere as deep as his. Another thing he did was purchase the rights the MSG corporation collection. He then tried to claim these rights extended to every fight ever fought in the Garden. Thats simply not the case. The Garden was leased by the corporation over the years to several different promotional companies who maintained the rights to their fights. Not the Garden. He also claimed to have purchased the rights to the IBC collection. That was an outright lie. Truman Gibson who was the nominal president of the IBC was on record as stating they never sold the rights to their films to anyone. Furthermore, as alluded to above, copyright laws have changed over the years several times. Before there was any television, and long before there was VHS, DVD, Bluray, or streaming there was no market for older fight films. There was no expectation that you would ever be able to capitalize on those films past their original run so there was no great emphasis on extending their copyright which you had to do proactively in the old days. As a result the vast majority of old films, even those produced after Jan 1, 1926 are now in the public domain. Jacobs, despite his best efforts, could not go back and retroactively apply a copyright to those films he acquired after they had lapsed. This all creates a very murky situation for ESPN whereby its much easier and safer from a liability standpoint to simply not air the vast majority of their collections rather than spend the time and money trying to ascertain if they own the rights to this film or that or throwing caution to the win by airing the film and possibly getting sued. Finally, there simply isnt that much a market for the older films. If you go on youtube you will see that the views for more popular more recent fights and fighters are astronomically higher than views for older fights and more obscure fighters and certainly from the BW era. ESPN has to make money, they do this by selling ad slots, the cost of those ad slots is dictated by the amount of people who watch their shows. So of course they are going to pander to the widest audience. Its smart.
Thnx 4 the info. It was very interesting, and enlightening too I suppose. It's too bad though, that the market does lie w/ new fights as you say, since those are total crap more often than not. Me, all I'm interested in is finding fights from the 30s through 80s. So, would you say that guys like Steve Lott and Tony Fosco are the same case as Jim Jacobs? Or are they another case entirely?
Are Lott and Fosco really collectors? If so, do they really have as many fights as they're rumored to have?
