The National Football League isn’t officially saying anything yet, but the league just suffered a major loss. Failing to get the nearly decade-long antitrust lawsuit over the lucrative Sunday Ticket package thrown out of court, the Roger Goodell-run NFL is going to trial for potentially $6.1 billion just over a week after this year’s Super Bowl.
With the Season 3 debut of Empire just weeks away, the first two episodes of the Fox blockbuster’s second season today are at the center of a potential big-bucks class action lawsuit filed over filming at a Chicago juvenile detention center that left hundreds of underage inmates in “lockdown.”
Just as a trial was to begin, Major League Baseball and its fans reached agreement today to expand the menu of online packages for televised games. Lawsuits had claimed that the leagues’ clubs and some television broadcast entities collude to eliminate competition in the airing of games on the Internet and on television. Baseball had defended a decades-old system of regional television contracts designed to protect each baseball team’s area from competitors.
MLB lawyers told a Manhattan federal court judge last week that fans will be able to buy single-team television packages this season if they don’t live in their favorite team’s market. In the past, consumers were forced to buy the games of all baseball teams because individual teams were not sold separately.
