Wouldn't it be better if Blizzard employed them? Set up internal league systems and actually embraced e-sports as a revenue generating area? I think the next evolution of e-sports will be a big name company actually doing the above. Problem is it is pretty risky to do. Games with huge fanbases and legacies of e-sports like starcraft/counterstrike are probably the only ones were it would work right out of the gate.
Maybe I'm having a brain fart, but... under what legal auspice could Blizzard force them to shut down the streams?
Copyright law. They already sued Kespa into submission. I'm guessing at some point that they will anoint a company with exclusive rights to broadcast SC2 and start suing everyone else.
Really? I would have thought it is fair use, but I guess no Machinima producers have true tested the law in this regard? Certainly Blizzard attempts to control the use through the TOU and restrict derivative content to non-commercial use only.
In the USA, fair use legal precedent has mostly been superseded by laws such as the DMCA. I don't agree with it, but that's the legal situation we're in these days.
I wasn't aware that fair use was superseded in any way by the DMCA. Cant you explain how that works?
But it's not Machinima... it's just a broadcast of their product being used exactly as it is intended. Wouldn't that be like a baseball bat manufacturer telling someone to take videos of their Little League game off of YouTube?
Well, they are adding commentary(audio) to video from in-game. To me that seems like machinima.