This is an article but it wasn’t taken off the Internet, not directly anyway. I get articles via email from the LJS that have no advertising with them. This was one of them and I copied it.
I have wondered at times how much of this goes on? I am not talking just at Nebraska but all over when men are coaching women’s sports. I also understand at this point this is alleged. We’ll see where it goes.
John Papenhagen
[Former Nebraska women’s basketball player accuses ex-coach of grooming her into sexual relationship]
A former member of the Nebraska women’s basketball team is suing the University of Nebraska after she was dismissed from the team amid allegations of an inappropriate relationship with an assistant coach.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Lincoln on Sunday, Ashley Scoggin accused former associate head coach Chuck Love of using his position and influence with head coach Amy Williams to groom her into a sexual relationship.
The lawsuit also alleges Williams and Husker Athletic Director Trev Alberts failed to ensure the coaching staff maintained appropriate boundaries with student-athletes and of violating her rights.
[Note: The balance of this article was removed by the list manager, to read it go to
Just because they emailed you the article without advertising, that doesn’t waive their copyright on it.
The copyright law provides for ‘fair use’ but nobody seems to really know where the line is on that. For example, it’s probably OK to sent it to someone in your family or to a friend, that seems like ‘fair use’, but to send it to a list with hundreds of members and an online archive may not be. (And if a copyright holder sees a violation and decides to take action they’re gonna go after the site, not the person who posted the message.)
That’s why in general it is better to post a short summary or excerpt and a link to the page. Of course if the link is behind a paywall, that raises other issues.
As to your question about how commonplace this is, my guess is that it has happened at nearly every school, though how frequently is harder to say. Hopefully, Trev Alberts let all the AD staff know that there’s a big risk that someone who is supervising or coaching a student could be accused of ‘grooming’ rather than just ‘flirting’, especially if it leads to a sexual relationship that doesn’t end happily. This may also violate university employee standards.
I know that is your policy and I have tried to respect and abide by that. I just thought this time was all right since there was no advertising. I am not trying to argue with you. It is your list and yours to run as you desire. I understand that and respect that. With that said I doubt there is anything to worry about if people post articles off the Internet.
I would believe that if advertisers had to chase down and prosecute people that “abused” the process about copying web sites they wouldn’t get anything else done. They would have to prosecute tens of thousands of people.
I am on several sports lists, mostly baseball, and have been on them for over twenty years. Articles are copied off the Internet and posted to those lists with some degree of regularity and have been for years. I am one of them that occasionally does this and so are the list managers. To my knowledge there have been no repercussions at any time for this practice.
Probably, more than anything, the advertisers don’t want to take the time to chase “perpetrators” down or pay the price to have it done. It would be nearly impossible to catch everyone, maybe anyone, and it would be a waste of time.
I’m not trying to be a bad guy here, either, just pointing out the potential for problems, which would more likely be on my plate than yours.
I am aware of a few instances of blatant copyright violations on the Internet being noticed by the copyright holders, usually they don’t get past the ‘cease and desist’ letter writing stage. As I noted, nobody knows where the line on ‘fair use’ really is, but I’d really rather not be the landmark legal case that decides it. The big guns will more likely be aimed at Google, X, and the AI community, deeper pockets.
We’ve got some journalists and lawyers on the list, though I’m not sure there are any intellectual property law specialists, I"d be interested in their thoughts on the subject. Mike Godwin may still be the expert on that, though I haven’t exchanged emails with him in over 20 years. (Yes, that’s the same Godwin as in Godwin’s Law.)
I agree with Ted that advertising is a red herring.
If you received the email from LJS, presumably that’s because at some point you signed up to have them send you emails. When you did that there were probably several pages of boilerplate text that you agreed to (which nobody ever reads) that, among other things, indicated you would honor their copyrights.
Anyway, hopefully it isn’t a big deal, the primary reason I brought it up was so that I can show that I make reasonable attempts as the site administrator to avoid infringing upon someone’s copyright.
I have no idea why the content producers would care. They have no loss as their message is out there anyway. The advertisers are the one’s that lose if their message has been limited.
There are multiple reasons why copyright owners protect their copyrights. Among other things they lose click counts if people don’t go to their website to read it but read it on someone else’s website. And that can affect advertising revenue. Putting that content behind strictly enforced paywalls means they’re losing potential subscription revenue, too.
I suspect these days the possibility of altered content (including pictures) adds another whole dimension to protecting one’s intellectual property.
The recent publicity surrounding Fani Willis, one of the biggest criminal cases in history, and her choice to jeopardize it all by hiring a former boyfriend as prosecutor has reinforced to me that workplace affairs should be grounds for immediate dismissal.
But This goes beyond that. Arguably there is no legal way for a coach to have a romantic relationship with an athlete and it not be sexual harassment at best and sexual assault/rape at worst. If Williams and Alberts knew it was happening…oof. That’s really, really bad.
The big guns will more likely be aimed at Google, X, and the AI community, deeper pockets.