Epstein is a 27-year-old New York lawyer who's behind FanCast.com, a site where anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection can become a sportscaster or a talk show host. If you have a TV tuned to a ballgame, you can do play-by-play, and folks can hear you -- and, if you'd like, interact with you -- through the Web site.

The idea is to overthrow what Epstein calls the "one size fits all" sportscasting regime, where everybody who wants to watch, say, the big Michigan-Notre Dame game has to listen to, say, Brent Musburger.

So here's what you're thinking: You're thinking, "Any rebroadcast, reproduction or retransmission of the pictures, descriptions and accounts of this game without express written consent ..." You're thinking FanCast is in for a world of hurt in the courtroom, just like Napster has been.

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"Obviously that was the first thing I looked at before I invested my entire life savings and that of my family into this venture," says Epstein, who walked away from the legal profession to found FanCast in September, when a one-year clerkship to a federal judge in Kalamazoo, Mich., ended. "I just treated it as a case that came in front of the judge, looked at the law on the issue, and I found out that the law lets sports fans watching a game on TV discuss what they're watching with other sports fans. That's the First Amendment right: Once they choose to broadcast something into your home, you can talk about it."

In other words, legally, FanCast ain't Napster. "I think culturally it's extremely similar," he says. "It is peer to peer, it is an industry that's used to having complete distribution of its content, sports is, and that's now being threatened. But legally it's different because we're not simply redistributing their content. We're generating our own."

Epstein says he hasn't heard any threatening noises from the networks or leagues -- "not even a Christmas card" -- and is confident of the merits of his case if they do get litigious, which he isn't anticipating. "They'd be suing sports fans," he says. "I'm a sports fan working out of my apartment, and there's other sports fans talking about sports, and I think it doesn't make a lot of public relations sense for them to be suing their own fans. But these are the guys who canceled the World Series, so you can't always attribute rational thought to them."

Epstein cites a 1997 case, NBA vs. Motorola, in which the basketball league sued over Motorola transmitting real-time scores and stats, gleaned from television and radio broadcasts, to pagers. The NBA initially won a permanent injunction banning the practice, but Motorola prevailed on appeal.

"Basically what the leagues and the networks are trying to do is say that the game itself is copyrightable -- they said if you don't find the game itself is copyrightable, you're going to have eventually somebody sitting back at home and broadcasting the game off the television," Epstein says. "And the court said the game itself is not copyrightable, and FanCast is now doing exactly what was predicted because the technology is such that it's now possible."

Calls to Major League Baseball for comment went unanswered.

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