Our days of posting our favorite baseball highlights on Twitter might be coming to an end, if they haven’t already. Recently, it appears as if MLB Advanced Media has been requesting that Twitter remove GIFs (technically, GIFs uploaded to Twitter are converted into video files, but the idea remains) that they believe violate copyright laws. It’s a move that’s both within the rights of MLBAM, yet still slightly confusing from a fan-engagement standpoint. If this is a harbinger of things to come, then our days sharing sports GIFs with our friends and followers might soon be over.
I first heard of the new policy via FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan. He had created a GIF of Felix Hernandez and tweeted it, but later got an email alerting him that it had been taken down.
As it happens, MLB had a video of the same highlight on their site. Now, Jeff’s GIF would be in violation of copyright whether MLB had their own highlight posted or not, it just seems like more than a coincidence. In the full email the above picture is referencing, there were other reported tweets from different Twitter users — notably @cjzero, who posts many videos of various sports through the social media platform. Sullivan believes this to be a mistake.
“Weirdly, in the same email, I saw notice of identical complaints filed about @cjzero and @megrowler. I probably wasn’t supposed to see those but multiple people responsible for this are stupid,” he said.
However, it shows that he is not the only one being targeted in this new development.
The idea is simple. MLB sees a GIF of a play or highlight and notices that they have the same video hosted on their web site. However, when the video is viewed on their web site, an ad is played beforehand. On Twitter, it’s not. MLB loses a (probably very tiny) source of revenue. MLB asks Twitter to take it down, Twitter complies.
