No no no - to anyone in sports or media, "Illegal" is defined as "Anything we don't like and/or can't charge extra for."

Speeling: it's illegal to transmit teleivsion over the internet

Yet another industry struggling to protect its business model from new technologies. I wish these people would just learn to move forward instead of entrenching.

Awesome. Another reason to not watch the MLB.

Ahh, MLB - they just love to wring as much money out of their product as possible. Remember when they paid the players' association to use their names and statistics and then went after fantasy baseball providers for infringing on the players' persona? Thankfully, the judge threw out the suit.

MLB and their stupid blackout rules on MLB.TV can bite me -- I'll sling local games over a box all I want.

MLB is one of the greediest corporations on the planet, make no mistake. I pay for mlb.tv because I live out of market and don't have a tv, but I still only get to watch about half the games because often when a game is played 1000 miles away and is not on any tv station I am still considered within the market. Ideally, MLB would have everyone pay twice for everything.

They also disgustingly recharge your credit card without telling you even if you only purchase one month and deselect auto-renew. That seems more illegal than using slingbox.

They say... "Plus, there's no guarantee that Slingbox will be around next year. It's a start-up."

You keep putting them on the news by trying to sue them and they will be a HUGE COMPANY!!! Keep it up MLB!!!

I love the slingbox and everything it stands for!

I've had my Slingbox over 2 years now and love it. I pay Comcast $160 per month for my receivers, channels, and dvrs. I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to watch a White Sox game from that tuner I'm PAYING FOR when I am sitting in a hotel room or using an internet hotspot. This is pure garbage. Especially since even if i WANTED to pay mlb.com to watch that same Sox game on MLB TV, they wouldn't even let me due to BS blackout restrictions. Scammers pure and simple.

Other leagues? The NHL just signed a deal with Sling Media to distribute some of their content.

"there's no guarantee that Slingbox will be around next year. It's a start-up."
They should've been saying this about the Nats, Rays, and Marlins for the past decade.

Just another reason why I don't support pro sports anymore.

Hasn't the MLB tried to imply that they don't want you to even describe the events of a game without express written consent? Much less rebroadcasting it or recording it.

Squeeze that stone a little more, MLB.

MLB: steroids good, technology bad.

Well crap! Where's John Kerry when they need him?

And just to summarize:

Watching MLB games that you've paid for across slingmedia = illegal

MLB athletes using steroids and other performance enhancing drugs to tarnish the sport = no problem

Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited.

@rmz: Happened to me. I took pictures of a trip to Milwaukee and then made three or four quicktime slideshows and put them up on YouTube. MLB came in and reported copyright infringement to YouTube and I was forced to remove them. They claimed copyright on pictures I took with my own camera during a game. I never received a reply from the corporate office of MLB on the matter.

     I wrote a blog about it, but I'm not a whore and Deadspin ran the story in Leftovers awhile back, and I think I deleted the movies from where I had them for the blog.

To Acid Reign: To make an indent, use &.nbsp (w/o the . between & and n). It's working in the preview, hopefully it does so in the post.

For example: driving 150 mph in a school zone while smoking crack and evading your taxes is "illegal."

You guys almost owed me a new monitor from orange soda damage. Consumerist, your source for snarky humor!

In light of recent comments on past articles and to keep pace with some people's sentiments here, I feel very offended by the driving at 150mph in a school zone joke in light of the VTech tragedy.

@The Walking Eye:
The NBA and many college teams have this exact policy regarding photographs.
They claim copyright for photos taken in their arenas/stadiums.

This is another example of corporations killing innovation and technology, all in the name of protecting their "intellectual property". What a joke. It's baseball!

What the MLB fails to realize is that you're not technically "broadcasting", you're watching your own cable, on your own TV. Only one user can login to the slingbox at a time, so it's not like you're just putting it out there for anyone to watch. If your home TV can legally receive the MLB broadcast, what right does MLB have to tell you where you sit while you watch your OWN TV??? Using the Slingbox is NO different than plugging in another TV in the bedroom or something. It's just another extension.

(m)ajor (l)ibel (b)ullshit

I wonder which is worse...

MLB claiming slingbox is "illegal," or Jamie Kellner claiming that skipping commercials is both theft and breach of contract...

[Skipping commercials is] theft. Your contract with the
network when you get the show is you're going to watch the
spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported
basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're
actually stealing the programming.

Bunch of morons.

I have to agree with MLB. It's their broadcast; they can set whatever terms they'd like. The proper market response would be to stop using their product, or perhaps create your own product and, oh, compete. Sure, their position is stupid, and sure, it's short-sighted. But that doesn't make it any less "theirs". If their product is *so* compelling that you can't live without it, and can't replace it with something else, then you've essentially made their case that it's worth the money. Don't like it? Don't steal it; ignore it. That's the true Kapitalist Way.

Well, they say the "transmission-shifting" is a rebroadcast... um... Sling Boxes are a point-to-point connection, not at all a broadcast. It's kind of like putting another TV on your receiver with a really long set of cables, or a directional RF transmitter. Frankly, I see even Ol' Gil being able to tell MLB to shoo.

@mbrutsch:

It's their broadcast; they can set whatever terms they'd like.

Once that broadcast leaves your transmitter, you have no control over how it can be used. There's no theft here - unencrypted radio signals broadcast into my private property are mine to do with as I please, likewise encrypted radio signals that I may lawfully decrypt. If you don't want someone to watch baseball, stop broadcasting it.

Now if someone is breaking the Sling license agreement or violating MLB's copyright (allowing 3rd parties watch, playing it for a public audience, etc.) that's a different story.

But using a Slingbox in one location to watch in private the broadcast signals that you have lawfully received even if they are in another location? Give me a break.

Hey baseball: I think it's time we pull the plug on you. I think MLB hates its audience almost as much as the RIAA does.

@WV.Hillbilly: "Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited."

I tried to rebroadcast with implied oral consent but I got busted.

Next thing you're going to tell me it's illegal to make copies of my DVDs unless their creator authorizes it.

This is why I didn't vote to include Consumerist as a news source in Google, as nitpicky as this may sound. The headline has "illegal" in quotes, but that word is never uttered in the quote from MLB. So why not put the actual words mentioned in quotes, "not legal"? Poetic license?

@Troy F.:
re: skipping ads = theft
no one ever answers the question:
Is it theft if I go pee while the ad is on?

Stupid execs.

@scottso:
Seriously? So what does "illegal" mean to you?

@junkmail: When something is in quotation marks, I generally interpret that to be a... quote from a source. The source didn't say "illegal." No newspaper or major news source edit a quote to make a better headline. They would remove the quotation marks or ... simply quote the source correctly.

Yeah, it's a nitpick - but it's also a hallmark of a true news source. For now, Consumerist is just a blog.

@Antediluvian: Don't worry, my friend - he covered that, too:

I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the
bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial.

So make sure you keep your potty breaks under 30 seconds, you no-good contract-breaking thief, you.

@scottso: it's a quote from the article "At a recent sports law symposium at Fordham University, The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. reported that MLBAM's General Counsel Michael Mellis called the popular set-top box's place-shifting feature illegal. "

Perhaps single quotation marks would have floated your boat as it wasn't a direct quote attributed to a person, but a paraphrased quote. Still, it's hard to tell whether Consumerist was quoting the article or the exec. Furthermore, double quotation are often used to set off irony. Maybe Consumerist was trying to show irony (of what? I dunno, could by a myriad of things concerning the MLB).

But if you think that "real" news doesn't produce misleading headlines, search "misleading headlines" and see who pops up.

Of course, if you really want to give MLB the true FU, just watch their games via P2P TV networks. Then you're truly doing what they're fearing most, for some strange reason. They should be happy that people ARE watching and their teams are getting extra exposure, at no cost to them.

@The Walking Eye: Thanks! Don't know how I missed that comment two weeks ago...

  We'll see if it works.