Slashdot Mirror
Who Owns Baseball Statistics?
Class Act Dynamo writes "A sports fantasy league company has asked a federal court to decided whether baseball statistics belong in the public domain as history or are the property of major league baseball. Basically, they had been licensing the statistics for nine cents (US) per gross from the Major League Baseball Players Association. But MLB recently bought the rights to be the sole licensor and has refused to renew the license of the fantasy league company. From the article: 'Major League Baseball has claimed that intellectual property law makes it illegal for fantasy league operators to commercially exploit the identities and statistical profiles of big league players.' What does the Slashdot community think? Shoud Barry Bonds' record 73 single season homeruns be in the public domain, or should I worry about having to pay royalties for the first part of this compound sentence?"
>In the UK the dates for the Football matches around the country are
>considered copyright
So you claim that UK copyright laws has specific regulation mentioning that the date of some football games ARE covered by copyright despite not having anything to do with what gives copyright and the requirements otherwise to get copyright on something? Fine, care to show that part of the UK copyright law? ALso note that since no other country I know of has such provisions it would be applicable to UK at most, although I don't believe there is such provisions in the UK copyright law, but feel free to point me to the law.
>the fixture list on the main website is accompanied by:
A website is not the law. If I decide to claim I have the copyright to my shoe size and post a copyright notice about it doesn't make that true.
>IIRC they successfully sued someone who was using the dates without
>permission.
Data bases have copyright protection (or similar to copyright). BUt that is something completely different. It is not the individual content of it that is protected but the database as such. You can't just take it as a whole, you can take individual facts or information from it though and present it yourself. SImilary a phone list book typically is protected under copyright law and you can't just copy it, however, the individual phone numbers are not protected. I guess the same what you refer to here, but feel free to link to the actual case so we can see.