If you asked a hundred Americans, "Who owns the news?", almost all of them would look at you funny and repeat something they learned in civics class about freedom of speech. But that freedom is getting caught up in conflicting notions of what, exactly, news is. There are differences between protesting the war by singing "Blowin' in the Wind" and including that performance in a movie.

Usually such questions are settled according to what takes place in public. But what happens when everything does? And what about events that take place in public but are owned by a private entity – a category that includes concerts and just about any athletic event with a large following?

It's more than an incidental question. Today's New York Times asks, "Who Owns Sports Coverage?" The story starts off with an anecdote about bloggers, but that's only the beginning. The real question is whether a sporting event is news, like a political speech, or entertainment, like a movie. Most print journalists consider sports to be news. But the athletic leagues don't. That's why they earn the vast majority of their money by selling the television broadcast rights to games. Networks that pay broadcast the games, while those that don't report on the results.

The question is when reporting on the results crosses the line into infringing on what is, after all, an entertainment product. To Major League Baseball – or the NFL or NBA – a sporting event is a performance, just as a concert is. So while anyone may report on what happened, they have the right to control video and audio recordings.

If my tax dollars weren't paying for their stadiums, I'd have an easier time seeing their side of the argument.

As the Times points out, there's more at stake here than sports. Last week ABC News told other networks that they could only use 30-second clips of its presidential debate, a restriction that most ignored. In this case, the majority of Americans would side with the other news outlets, following the logic that every citizen has the right to see our candidates argue about the difference between hoping for change and working for change. Except that ABC News paid to present the debate, and it's hard to imagine they made much money doing so.

I have no solutions, only more questions – and a nagging sense that the desire of some businesses to broadcast everything is going to put other businesses in a situation where they can no longer afford to create anything.