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?"

Comments

Facts?

[EEBaum]

What, we can own facts now?

Somehow I'm not at all surprised.

Re:Facts?

[Anonymous Coward]

There have always been stupid people and there always will be. The question is who are the more stupid, those whos ideas are insanity manifest or we who allow such fools to be elevated to positions of power and authority? I will give you two quotes in the context of which my feelings will be self evident.

If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.

A Einstein

On two occasions I have been asked by members of Parliament, 'Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of
ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage

I myself cannot imagine the mental disorder neccesary to consider as information property or
the absence of realism which leads one to believe that it can be controlled. That we are even having this debate is quite surreal and fills me with optimism that by the logic of natural law our children will look back at the 'intellectual property' debacle at the start of the 21st century, and piss their pants laughing.

Re:Facts?

[Dashing Leech]

there is no such thing as "right to results"

There might be one caveat to that. First, though, I'd add that it's not clear which IP law they're referring to. You can't patent it, neither the calculations which are standard mathematical formula nor the numbers that result from calculation. It can't be copyright. That's for a specific expression. For example, you can repeat the exact same information someone has written about and just use your own words. So as long as they don't copy, say, sports articles that quote statistics but just use the statistics, they should be fine.

That being said, I seem to recall a case a few years ago about compiled lists and copyright. Something like a company that wanted the copyright on their customer list because someone else was using it. Does anybody else remember something like that? I don't remember the outcome.

If something like compiled lists are copyrightable, it seems to me that it can't be held up if someone compiles their own list, i.e., does the statistical calculations themselves. The question then becomes where they get the raw data if MLB doesn't release it. Curious. This does seem dumb though.

Re:On the Subject of Baseball

[Al Dimond]

Well one might say there are multiple kind of precedent. There is precedent in the legal sense where our courts must decide whether these statistics can be owned, and there is also what one might call "historical precedent". Businesses will constantly try to bend the law in their favor, even if historically rulings have gone the other way. Big and powerful businesses have a pretty good chance of doing it, even. But if there's a historical precedent that back in the days of nought-six the MLB got too greedy and fans lost their connection and walked away... well businesses know there's no judge to whom they can argue to try to get that overturned. They'll be careful to not repeat those mistakes because their money depends on it.

(I guess it must be pretty hard to be greedy enough to be subject to the second kind of precedent, 'eh? We can see that in almost every industry. I guess that's why we need the lawmakers and courts to step in sometimes. I agree with you that this is one of those times.)

So, are the stats made up numbers?

[Jamesday]

The key question: Is MLB claiming that the statistics are original creative works (made up numbers:)) it can get a copyright on or facts? :)

Probably using the publicity rights of the players instead of copyright law. Not really good to claim you're making up the numbers... :)

Not the weirdest

[www.sorehands.com]

There was a case in Texas, where building codes were copyrighted. In Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l Inc., No. 99-40632 (5th Cir. 2002) the 5th circuit found that once the law was enacted, that the law once enacted became public domain.

Or it took an appeals court to rule that a cow is not a motor vehicle.

So in a year or so..

[LokiOfRagnar]

Unless the MLB can claim IP on the game itself they will loose out eventually. In a year or so the fantasy leagues will be more competitive, more interesting and more commercial then anything the stadiums have to offer. Anyways, any sportsorganization that claims to have a world series but fails to have a team present at the real world cups does not have a legitimate claim on existence anyways..

cheers,
Loki.

Re:On the Subject of Baseball

[NitsujTPU]

There's the flip side.

If they keep doing this, one of two things will happen.

1) Everything that you experience for your entire life will be monitored, controlled by, and owned by a corporate entity. They'll make sure that you're not exposed to ideas like "freedom of thought." You won't care, because you won't know that there is an alternative.
2) Sometime before that happens, people will understand what's happening, and how to stop it. When MLB goes belly up (because nobody wanted to go anymore anyway), they'll oust their congresspeople from office (who, by then, will be subsidizing baseball). They'll start voting correctly, and thinking correctly. We won't need a bloody revolution, we'll just have people who don't let these things happen.

Re:That's stupid

[chicagotypewriter]

Baseball statistics are easily downloadable in a database format with one line for every player season in MLB history. That is an amzing treasure trove of information, even for casual fans. Highly recommended.

the lahman database is probably what you speak of. thats actually how i learned python: wrote a little app to search for a person, a range of a certain stat, players by college they attended, etc.

Rights in databases, not in facts

[john-da-luthrun]

I'm not sure what the US position is, but in the European Union we have "database rights" that are rights in a database as a whole, rather than in the data held within that database. So in the case of baseball, there's nothing to stop you revealing that so-and-so scored 70 home runs in a season, but you might be prevented from systematically using the database in order to compile a searchable database of home runs per season across all players over the past 50 years.

That said, attempts by sporting bodies in Europe to enforce these rights have not met with success. For example, the British Horseracing Board tried to stop the bookmakers William Hill from using the BHB database of pending horse races for its website, and various football governing bodies tried to use database rights to force companies publishing TV listings (TV companies, newspapers etc.) to pay royalties for including details of football fixtures in their listings.

All these attempts failed when the European Court of Justice held that the sporting bodies had not invested sufficient resources in creating these fixtures databases. All the effort had actually gone into arranging and managing the fixtures in order to run the actual sport, and getting a database that could then be licensed to others was just a by-product of this main activity, rather than something needing sufficient effort in its own right to qualify for database rights.

Re:Compilations of facts

[cameldrv]

Not since Feist v. Rural Telephone Service. Facts compiled without any creativity are not copyrightable. The case I mentioned above was specifically about copying phone books wholesale, and the Supreme Court ruled that the phone book could not be copyrighted.

Football Facts?

[rishistar]

In the UK the dates for the Football matches around the country are considered copyright - the fixture list on the main website is accompanied by:

"Copyright © and Database Right 2005 The FA Premier League Ltd / The Football League Ltd / The Scottish Premier League Ltd / The Scottish Football League. All rights reserved. Fixtures are subject to change. See Terms & Conditions."

IIRC they successfully sued someone who was using the dates without permission.

Re:Football Facts?

[gnasher719]

'' 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. ''

In Germany, there has been a judgement that it is illegal to make copies of German Telecom's CD containing the complete phone directory, and it is illegal to buy a complete collection of phone books and scan them, but it _is_ legal to buy a complete collection of phone books (weighs about two tons), hire a few dozen people to type everything into a computer, and use that to create, then duplicate and sell your own phone directory CD.

Re:Compilations of facts

[archmedes5]

While the document does, in fact state that the facts themselves aren`t copywritable (Only their arrangement and selection), all data is derived from members of the MLB organization. Though this information was generated through observation of the players` physical exertion, one could possibly construe a baseball players` performance as an original expression of his physical acuity. It`s a show he puts on for the spectators, and information gathered from that performance could possibly be copywritable.

It`s especially possible if he`s only given MLB permission to disseminate information about his performace, either through ticket sales to bring in observers, publication of statistics in television, radio, or print, or broadcasting in television or radio the performace from which these statistics may be derived.

Re:That's stupid

[zotz]

From the page you linked to:

"Limited Use License

This database is copyright 1996-2006 by Sean Lahman. A license is granted for individual use for research purposes only. It may not be re-distributed without permission. Any commercial use, or other dissemination of the database in part or in whole is prohibited. Use of this database constitutes acceptance of these terms."

Is he gonna sue MLB? For violating his claimed copyrights?

all the best,

drew