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Wednesday, October 19th 2005, 4:05pm
Quoted
It's fair enough if ESL only want to allow ESL TV for a showmatch like this. However, charging from the replays is another thing. If they charged from the replays there would simply be no interest in an event such as this. The community and players might even riot. Furthermore, the EULA of the game should make sure that Blizzard owns the right to any replay, and therefore ESL shouldn't be able to use them for commercial purposes. So far, we've seen leagues such as Prime League not releasing their replays so that people will watch them on TV (although having a special offer that you can buy replays), and we have had some sites making bundled offers of articles, interviews, replays, etc. for premiem members. SK insider offers WC3 replays and CS demos as well. However, I'm not sure how Blizzard would look upon ESL charging for single replays, even though I'm sure the case where replays are kept unreleased, though occationally purchased, like Prime League, would be understandable.
Charging for the right to download a certain replay from a site is not selling the replay. It is selling the right to use the site and its bandwith to download it. But if you do that people could just uploaded the same replay on a free site. The charging site could not do anything about it because they never owned, or sold, the replay themselves in the first place. All this in mind there is absoloutly no incentive for ESL to charge for these replays but they certainly could do so if they wanted to.
