Found at Last: A Tape of the First Super Bowl

[bijou]

Football fans know what happened in Super Bowl I. The game, which was played on January 15, 1967, was the first showdown between the NFL and AFL champions. It ended with the Green Bay Packers stomping the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.


Unless they were one of the 61,946 people at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that day, or one of the fans who watched it live on NBC or CBS, there's one thing that all football fans have in common: They've never actually seen the game.

In a bizarre confluence of events, neither network preserved a tape. All that survived of this broadcast is sideline footage shot by NFL Films and roughly 30 seconds of footage CBS included in a pre-game show for Super Bowl XXV. Somehow, an historic football game that was seen by 26.8 million people had, for all intents and purposes, vanished. ...The tape's owner said through his attorney, Steve Harwood of Norfolk, Va., that the recording had been shot by his client's father, who recorded the broadcast by WDAU-TV in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on a videotape machine at his workplace in hopes the tapes might someday be valuable. ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704709304576124373773290508.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_lifeStyle

[thundley4]

Mr. Harwood, the attorney, says he contacted the NFL in 2005 about the tape. He says the league sent him a letter on Dec. 16, 2005 claiming the NFL was the exclusive owner of the copyright.

I have to wonder if that can be true.  With no recording known to be made at the time, would the NFL have bothered to copyright it?  It doesn't seem likely that their current copyright could be made to be retroactive.