Friday, December 01, 2006

ESPN Page 2's Editors Are A Bunch Of Douchebags

As if you weren't already aware.

Wanted to alert you, our faithful 32 readers per day (thats how many unique visitors we're told paruse this part of The Internets) about a little story. In Scoop Jackson's column for ESPN Page 2 (found here), he writes another terrible column. Typically, we'd just ignore it and move on, as per the usual behavior when a Scoop Jackson column shows up. This time, however, something caught our eye: he wrote a first-person story from the perspective of the NBA's new ball, calling himself "Orange Roundie".

One of the better NBA blogs on the net, YAY Sports, has been creatively referring to the ball as Orange Roundie for quite some time now. Scoop stole the reference, used it in his column, and provided no reference for where he got it! What is that?

I'll tell you what that is, it's theft of intellectual property, and it's wrong. ESPN Page 2 has since edited the article to reflect the reference, but it's a bit ridiculous. And perhaps more importantly, he used "Orange Roundie" incorrectly. I let the good folks at YAY explain:
Another point that’s really clawing at us is that Scoop completely misunderstood and bastardized the humor in “Orange Roundie” and the personality of same. You don’t throw that phrase out there without going back to the source and seeing it in context.

And you certainly don’t try to do a lame imitation of someone else’s character. This is like if someone wrote their own Spider-Man comic and gave him bird powers.

Since we’ve got stealing on the mind, allow us to steal from Seinfeld – this portion of the problem doesn’t offend us as the owner of “Orange Roundie”, it offends us as a comedy writer.

Anyhow, Scoop claims that the editors took out his URL reference. Either way, it's terrible. That's about all we've got to say on this topic, but I felt it appropriate to show a little support for one of our fellow NBA Bloggers when the big boys try and step all over us.

No comments: