Hostages and Ransoms of Our Time

Hostages and Ransoms of Our Time or

What people do to make money these days

Owners of Scores
Currently there is a court battle on whether Major League scores are copyrightable. The major leagues are claiming that scores are the property of the leagues and belong to them. No newspaper, website, radio show or person can publish or broadcast them without their permission or licensing. This means that all the scores and updates that you receive in the future would have to be approved (err.. paid for). As if the leagues not not making enough money through exorbitant ticket prices and merchandised goods. Shame on you!

Hijacking Blogs
A few days mblog.com a blogging service decided overnight that, it was too expensive to continue the free service and became a pay service. Without warning of any sort, when users logged on one fine day they were informed that not only had the service now become a paid one but also, if they wanted their archived blogs back they would have to pay 35$ to access them. This raises the question -
Who owns the blog material?
1. The author or the service? It's like the owner of a garage refusing to give your car back because overnight he faced some cash flow problems.
2. Or are we all just writers without a contract with e-publishers?
3. Suppose somebody decides to publish the blogs as a book, does the blogging service have any right on the profits?
4. Technically since this work is published would you need to get their permission to publish your work elsewhere?
5. How many have actually read the Terms of Service. I didn't it's time I did.

Old M-bloggers have formed the Coalition against E-terrorism. We have already seen the result of the few email service providers that decided to become pay services a few years ago. ( Is usa.net is still around, in the sense that is it still popular?) Hope blogger.com does not go down this path. I asked this question to the blogger.com team, still waiting for an official response from blogger.com. With the Google stock doing so well it does not seem likely, but there is no end to human greed.
In the meantime it seems like a good idea to have all your blogs archived in .txt format somewhere else. Perhaps to some these blogs are worthless scraps of yellowed e-paper, but they mean something to me.