LeBron James claims copyright infringement over Alabama’s “Shop Talk” series

As most here are aware, Nick Saban recently participated in a video series called “Shop Talk,” designed to show off the Tide’s new in-house barbershop and allow former Tide players who now enjoy NFL spoils to promote the program by talking about the reasons they chose Alabama, and how their on-campus experiences helped them grow. It is pretty clearly designed to help recruiting.

Well, it turns out that none other than LeBron James has a beef with it.

James has a multimedia platform called “Uninterrupted” that is backed by big corporate money and allows professional athletes to share personal video content with fans. In one of the episodes, James and Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors shot a barbershop conversation that aired during last season’s NBA Finals, and there have been a couple of barbershop episodes since. Apparently they believe that Alabama’s videos are damaging their brand:

“Your continued exploitation of ‘Shop Talk’ infringes ‘Uninterrupted’s’ copyright, trademark rights and other valuable intellectual property rights in ‘The Shop’ and significantly damages ‘Uninterrupted’s’ commercial prospects for ‘The Shop,’” the letter reads, in part.

The letter goes on to invite a conversation with Alabama before “rushing into legal proceedings.”

Translation: pay us or shut it down.

While they certainly have the right to protect their interests, this seems like an awfully tough sell. James and company hardly invented the barbershop, or the concept of a barbershop as a place for men to sit and swap yarns. Both episodes are embedded below.

What do you think?