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?"
What, we can own facts now?
Somehow I'm not at all surprised.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I have recently acquired the rights to myself as a statistic. You may license me as a single number in your statistics if you pay an appropriate licensing fee.
Otherwise, you must cease including me in your statistics, like so:
MLB Fans: 27 - 1
I thought this whole IP thing coult not get any wierder.
Next the government will start copyrighting statistics they do not want to get out.
Shit, I shouldn't have said that, just gives people ideas.
A blog about stuff.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
According to the poll in the article, only 3% of the people responding agree with MLB. Given the recent declining popularity of baseball as it tries to compete with video games, hockey, extreme sports, arena football, DVDs, and internet poker, maybe they should take into consideration the opinion of their fans on issues like this.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Statistics aren't owned, they just *are*. I mean, any idiot can work out the stats by looking at who won what match, which is public knowledge.
Since the match results are public knowledge and the mathematical methods to work out the stats are both public knowledge and trivial, the result is public knowledge and can't be owned. Gee, Only In America©...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The article says NINE PERCENT OF GROSS (9%), while the blurb says NINE CENTS PER GROSS ($0.000625 each). Big difference there, unless the blurb got that figure from somewhere not in the article.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Sorry.
With reasoning like that, I could go to the bar and drink 20 beers and then charge my friends royalties when they tell each other about it.
Seriously, though, do I even need to explain why this is ridiculous? How can publicly broadcasted factual information be property?
This will probably offend all the MLB fans out there, but I really just don't care. These guys are already over paid. Attendance is down because the ticket prices and concession prices, which the teams get a cut of, are already far too high. I don't know about where you live, but it's $5 for a dixie cup full of beer here on top of a $45 ticket. That's a bit too steep. Add in a couple of kids, some hotdogs and some cokes, and you can easily spend $300 for crappy seats at the Baseball game. Now they want to try to wring more money out of the fantasy baseball leageues? These guys are going to corporate themselves to death. The new national sport will be soccer soon until the soccer players become overpaid, whiny, wimps too.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Aren't there precedents with phonebooks and such that while a particular presentation of facts can be copyrighted, the facts themselves cannot? If that is the case, what is the MLB's lawyer thinking when he advised the go-ahead on the exclusive license and refusal to let fantasy league operators use the stats at a price? Or are they using an alternative definition of "Intellectual Property" that I am not aware of?
Are they seriously trying to argue that records that a player set, as well as numbers calculated from the tabulated performance of an athelete are not facts? I seriously fail to see why MLB thinks that it has any ground here. Though, to be fair, TFA didn't give much insight to the MLB's argument since
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
In a related soon-to-be story, the Government, Inc. has now refused to licence statistical information on the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq, so anyone who reports this as anything other than "zero" will be arrested and detained, indefinately, with no access to a lawyer or due process - after all, you're obviously a terrorist sympathizer to commit such an act.
Similarly, all information on indigenous peoples in North America prior to the pilgrims is also unlicensed, so the people formerly known as "Native Americans" will no longer be entitled to run casinos or given any "special considerations".
The issue is not whether Player X had 37 RBIs and 22 HRs last season. It's whether a business can be based off the names and identities of the players. I couldn't go around selling pictures of your mother without an agreement from her, she could sue me. This is why photographers have release forms for models (not that your mom is a model or anything).
Let them do it and let them succeed. The faster that games return to a stadium only activity, the faster that television goes into terminal decline, the faster so-called celebrities disappear up their own anuses, the quicker we might get back to a society in which people actually do things instead of just consuming images and sounds. There is something deeply wrong in a society in which a basketball player is paid more than an entire team of Aids researchers, and advertising copywriters are paid more than government ministers.
Pining for the fjords
It seems like the MLB would be making the right move by simply letting them license. If they were to win, this would also allow other leagues such as the NFL to make the exact same argument and win by default based on this ruling. MLB Absolutely has the rites to take the Baseball historical data, archive it in a database, call the database scheme and raw data their intellectual property and sell queries to whoever is willing to pay the per-query fee.
If the argument here is "can they refuse service to this company legally?", I think that is much different than making the argument "MLB owns baseball data and no one else can use it without permission". The latter would never hold up in court.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
I got dibs on planck's constant!
A blog about stuff.
100% of my household thinks this is going too far. what's next? having a really good memory outlawed? i'm tired of the arguement "we lose money if.." maybe that's why drugs are illegal; drug dealers complained that "we would lose money if drugs were legal". it all makes sense now.. lemme get back to my drugs.
That depends! If the MLB collected the statistics, and just gave their customers some sort of database, spreadsheet or whatever, then of course they should get money for it.
If the fantasy league themselves have collected the statistics, then of course the MLB should not get a cent.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I bought Avagadro's Constant and the Hubble Constant off eBay, and I own stock in e, pi and the golden ratio.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Facts and figures cannot themselves be protected by copyright (though the selection and presentation of them can, in a very limited form). That was established pretty unambiguously in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?There may be some protection under the 'hot news' doctrine (International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?c ourt=US&vol=248&invol=215 ), but I'm pretty sure modern courts would follow the reasoning of the 2nd Circuit (though not binding on non-2nd Circuit courts, unlike the Supreme Court opinions cited above, which are binding on all U.S. courts) in National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc., 105 F.3d 841 (2d Cir. 1997) http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/105_F3d _841.htm ...
In summary, MLB can shove it, IM(ns)HO.
geek. lawyer.
It is my understanding that the relevant codes in the United States copyright laws formally define what is meant by creative work and what may be protected by copyright as any original creation of authorship in a tangible medium, although the law has been amended to include certain creative works, including computer software, which are not tangible in the traditional sense of the word. However, it would be quite a stretch to interpret the gathering of raw statistics, baseball statistics in this instance, as a creative work. If there is some other work created based upon these statistics, such as the formulation of a thesis or comparison, which is then written up in an article or paper and published then that would more readily, depending upon the content, fall under the definition of a creative work. In the practical sense it is perfectly reasonable for major league baseball, or indeed any other information broker, to gather and maintain a database of these statistics and charge whatever they wish for factual reports of this information. It seems to me that the statistics themselves, especially when presented outside the context of the game in which they originally occurred as part of broader comparisons, are not protected by copyright and therefore anyone who wants to sell such information is not impeded by copyright laws.
Note: I am not a lawyer and I do not mean for this to be taken as legal advice. It is merely the opinion of a private citizen and is presented as-is.
Did you hear who won the Sox game? Yeah it was great! Who won? I can't tell you, I only sent the MLB a check for $20 in royalties and I already told 10 people. Seriously... if this one goes the wrong way if moving to Canada.... yeah I said it.
-- Eekrano
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...
Or it took an appeals court to rule that a cow is not a motor vehicle.
Fight Spammers!
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.
maybe the American lunar expedition did not leave Hollywood at all.
I recall that the NBA was suing companies that were sending out the scores of games over some wireless pager or cells phones. I guess this means that you can pay the money for the license to a seat, but forget about SMS'ing somene or telling anyone what the score was.
The person or entity that does the actual recording of the data owns it. So if only Alice records the number of home runs, then Alice is the sole owner of that data. She can charge whoever uses that information. Now if Bob goes to all the games and records the home runs as well, then he can charge for his copy. He can even release it into the public domain and screw Alice over. Such is the nature of intellectual property.
Another example would be a biography. I write the story of my life, thus I own the copyright. No one can go and plagarize that. They need to do their own independent research to biograph my life. They can't copy willy nilly from my autobiography, lest they want an interesting final chapter.
Moral of the story: record your own damn data.
Prediction of story: sports fans unite create an open stastics site.
- Nolan Eakins http://nolan.eakins.net/
All of them. Teachers have to be recruited from Germany en France to teach US college kids simple math, yet any moron that can hit a ball faster than average gets scholarshipped all the way through adulthood. Stop supporting a system you disapprove of. Look, remember O.J. Simpson? What you probably didn't see (but the rest of the world did, they watch CNN) was that a lot of US people actually didn't care whether he killed his wife and lover or not: he was their sports hero.
You guys are so short sighted you make the RIAA look like a bunch of visionaries.Well, it ís like taking candy from a baby. Care to talk about ethics?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
There's a difference between facts and ideas. Facts simply exist, they are what they are. However, ideas, such as stories, which aren't necessarily facts, should be handled differently. It would be one thing to say certain facts about a certain person. It would be entirely different to go out and tell a fictional story someone has copyrighted.
i managed to spend just over 10 years playing this sport called professional baseball... 3 arm surgeries, angle repaired (too many hangovers and omelette house bfasts at 3am during 14 hour bus rides to Midland got me i guess) they are just killing themselves with this last stats idea... come on, i played for parts of 3 or 4 seasons in the 'bigs' and ended up with 50 some odd appearances (left-handed reliever no less) and now you are saying my 5+ ERA is worth something? will i ever see the .00000001 my meager numbers earned? i don't care... but i don't want them charging someone to 'download' it or 'view' it or 'print' it... gawd they have some balls (no pun intended)
i was against the strike in 1995 and while my arm was shot by then, i felt i could still came out of 'retirement' to stage a final 'comeback'... too bad my arm had a different story than what my head was telling me.. :)
i love that game... learned a lot from it... good AND bad... i truly hope they figure things out so that i will be able to take my sons to a game someday and not be embarrassed...
sig goes here!
This story once again points out the deep absurdity of IP laws, and the complete lack of any absolute authority for laws in general, or what Montaigne referred to as the "mystical foundation of authority" in law:
"Laws are now maintained in credit, not because they are just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other." -- from "Essais 3", ch. 13
In the information age, its clear that the idea of ownership of specific sets of ones and zeros is pretty ridiculous and only continues because of government approved thuggery. Its interesting to see the ways that even this attempt at authority is being gradually eroded in the 21st century.
Considering that MLB would almost certainly lose if they tried to make this argument in court, looking their gift horse in the mouth was not the smartest of ideas, methinks.
They were getting PAID by companies to license information that's in the public domain. They should have kept to chuckling in the boardroom and stayed quiet on what was a great deal for them. Instead they've thrust the issue into the spotlight. If this company succeeds in court, more and more licensees may decide that licensing stats from the MLB is a stupider idea than, say, using those stats for free...
"We now live in the ownership society. They own it, and you can rent it for a fee"
Glen Phillips - August 30, 2005, Jammin Java Cafe'
--
BMO
I'm not sayin' it's right, but I suspect that they'll go after not the facts per se, but use a strategy that depends upon the compilation copyright on how those facts are delivered en masse.
An example: you can't copyright individual phone numbers, but the phone companies do own a compilation copyright on the collections of those phone numbers. Since MLB owns the broadcasts, and the derivitive works made from those broadcasts, I suspect that they'll say that the grouping of those statistics that is delivered with a broadcast is copyrighted, so any transcription of those statistics is copyrights, and so those compilations can not be delivered to the fantasy leagues in the first place (before individual facts are extracted from the compilations).
Pretty revolting, but there it is.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
is this the begining of being able to rewrite history? if only one holder is allowed to posses the statistics, won't it make it difficult to disprove the information? can dell start saying "only .01% of our computers break in the first 10 years"? i could just be over-reacting, but officially single-sourcing information, if that's where this might lead, is a scary road.
Sorry, but the telco already owns the rights to your number. Or maybe the publisher of the phone book -- which is not necessarily the same entity anymore since deregulation, privatisation and Local Loop Unbundling. At least you knew where you were when BT was all there was. Nowadays you have a choice of different phone companies who will put you on hold, charge you for it and make you repeat yourself at least three times to people whom you have to wonder how the f**k they made it into work that day. Actually I'm surprised they aren't paying Dorling-Kindersley to print the privatised phone books for them. They could have huge, glossy colour photographs of every subscriber -- and absolutely no useful information whatsoever.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Obligatory Onion link.
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.
is surely a big swirly pattern on the screen after each match
"You will forget who won, you will forget who won, you won't pirate our stats."
It must really piss them off with all the DRM they're intent on sticking on media they can't actually do this. Just imagine the fun of being able to resell you the same match every week. In fact they'd just need to tape one game, fire the players and broadcast the tape in loop.
New legislation will be passed making the Person2Person sharing of stats illegal - MLB agents will be kicking down the doors of mothers whose children discussed results in the playground.
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.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
that if you want statistics for running your fantasy league, then you either get a license and pay them for them, or else do the legwork yourself and compile your own stats by putting your own trackers into all the games and doing the number crunching with results you've obtained for yourself... of course, if you try that approach, we'll soon see them claiming copyright in the names of the players...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Do they compile statistics for "best hitter convicted of a DUI"?
What about "Drug of choice for a Hall of Famer?"
Maybe the most interesting ones would be "Most hits and runs by a player convicted of hit-and-run..."
This stuff makes me despise sports even more than I do now.
-- My Weblog.
Remind me to never bother using up any of my life finding out about this game... sounds really exciting
A bad ruling on this could create precedents that affect you whether you badly. e.g. What are you going to do when you want to publish software bug statistics?
Something like this needs to be fought at every stage.
That's a problem with the law. The stroke of a pen can restrict the freedoms of millions of people.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Where did you find a non-commercial newspaper? All of the major newspapers around here are for-profit, some owned by quite large corporations (i.e. Advance Publications). Both the newspaper and the fantasy league are reporting sports statistics for profit making, entertainment purposes. There is no distinction based on profit.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Cricket and Baseball have similarities in that they're both highly statistics based games.
In Cricket, the scores are most definitely public domain. I used to work for a company called Cricinfo as one of their admins in it's earlier days, and it's stats database (statsguru) is arguably the most complete source of statistics for cricket in the last few decades.
It was started by a group of fans into an ongoing company, simply because the stats on cricket were public domain. And it's raised a good sum of money in sponsorship for cricket along the way, and been a focal point for fans around the world.
Now, if the statistics for Cricket were deemed to be in the public domain, as it was quite possible for people to watch the match, tell someone else, and they could discuss it anywhere at any time, what makes Baseball different (apart from the fact that the organisers are trying to gouge money on everything they possibly can)?
That's right. Hu is on first. Don Hu, a chinese gentleman. Frank Watt is on second and Pierre Iaduneau from Quebec is on third.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
All your intellectual property are belong to us. No, really, we own the rights to it. And 51% of the human genome. So basically you belong to us.
I think legally it will hold up in court. All that means is that the laws need to be changed.
We should take up a collection for this: Buy the rights to, or patent if unowned, the genes that allow our lungs to process oxygen. Then demand, in court, a $.0001 loyalty fee per breath per person. While entirely silly, it would force the courts to rethink there policies and laws. As a bonus, if they don't reconsider , we'll all be rich.
Note: The intellectualy propery for this idea is soley mine. Anyone using this idea will have to pay me 10% of gross profits.
You could argue that, but you'd be wrong. The outcome is not protected by copyright anymore than the basic plot outline of a novel is protected by copyright. Its perfectly legal to tell someone that The Lord of the Rings is about a fight between good and evil, and that good wins in the end. Oh, and there's wizards. Facts about a copyrighted work are not part of the copyrighted work itself, even if the author/artist/etc. created those facts.
Caveat: I have dabbled in fantasy baseball once or twice, but I just can't get excited about it.
MLB has been doing their best to rein in "their" IP for years. They tried it with sports photographers a number of years ago by not allowing them to sell their photographs for anything but news. These beat photographers sure as heck can't make a living off of what the papers are paying them. Selling a few images here and there is what helps pay the mortgage and, at the same time, provides positive press for MLB. The photographers en masse went to MLB and said if we can't sell them then we'll go shoot weddings and your sport will get zero images in the newspapers. MLB relented.
Let's go deeper into the onion. If stats are not the property of MLB, then game manufacturers can use these stats to build into their games. If they've got the stats, then who needs MLB/MLBPA licensing?
And now down one more level, if MLB can license the stats, why can't they license the results. In turn, can Las Vegas casinos then accept bets if they don't pay MLB a portion of the take? MLB could end up with the rest of Pete Rose's earnings.
And now down a crazier level... If newspapers don't license the results, can they publish them in the newspaper? And if they're not required to license them, then why is fantasy baseball required to? After all, they're both making money off of the results. This all becomes ugly issues and more negative press for MLB.
Regardless of whether MLB wins in court, any money that they make sure as hell won't go to the players. Not that they particularly need it (because they don't), but it's the owners making a buck on the players backs (and arms and legs and...) that they won't account for when they cry poverty and whine that they don't have money for that new stadium. But you tax payers certainly do or we're gonna move.
MLB needs to pull their heads from the exit end of their digestive tract and realize that for many folks fantasy baseball is the only reason that they still give a damn about the sport. And they can't afford to lose many more fans than they all ready have.
Starting next week, all passwords will be entered in Morse code
"Barry Bonds either did or did not hit 73 homers. Kerry Wood did or did not fan 20 Astros in a game. I don't see how that can be "owned"."
/rant
If I recall, recent investigations into steroid use in MLB may result Barry Bonds' record being 'owned.' Ditto with investigations into surgical enhancements of pitching arms resulting in Kerry Wood's historical performance being 'owned.' Or maybe I should say 'pwned,' seeing as I, and many others, will forever consider any records set in the recent era to have an asterisk next to them.
Of course, these things did happen during the course of a game/season. And MLB claims that any accounts of the game (written or otherwise) are the property of MLB -- this would include statistics, since they are an account of the game.
As I see it, if MLB can own the copyright on the video of the game, then they can own the copyright on what happened during the game. The two are one and the same.
The answer, to me, is that neither should be valid except during live broadcast of the game. This preserves the MLB television revenue, while keeps fans and others happy by allowing them to have later use of the game / statistics / etc.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There is a great book on the history of stats in baseball, "The Numbers Game : Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics".
Those who ran baseball didn't really know what they had when it came to people's fascination with the numbers of baseball. One newspaper man started publishing basic numbers from some games, with the early calculated stats, like Batting Average, and people ate it up. It wasn't until a bit later that more statistics based on the basic numbers started being created, and even today, ESPN, Stats Inc., and other outlets occasionally create new ways to process the numbers (like range stats, true clutch stats, etc.)
MLB and the Players' Association need to be careful not to shoot themselves in the foot, since Fantasy Baseball generated a high level of additional interest in all games, not just local market games.
ESPN and other sites even show line stats with game scores, as well as offering special Fantasy segments on their shows. Don't mess with these additional markets and marketing opportunities.
Thanks for the spoiler. Not all of us have read the books yet, let alone seen the movies they were based on.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
One thing that I haven't seen brought up in the comments yet is how bloody stupid MLB is being here. The people who play in fantasy leagues are quite likely to be die-hard baseball fans, the ones who can rattle off all the stats for their favorite players at the drop of a hat, watch all the scores & hilights to keep up with the players they've got on their fantasy teams, talk a lot about the sport with their friends, and of course, go to games. Telling these fans that they can't play in their fantasy leagues any more because the stats are MLB property and nobody's allowed to use them would seem to me a sure-fire way to provoke a very angry reaction amongst those fans. Now they're not going to games, they're not spending money on your stuff, and they're telling their friends to do the same, and telling them why.
There's no win here for MLB. Either they lose the case, which makes them look stupid, or they win it, which makes them look heavy-handed. One would think any competent PR person could tell them as much -- assuming MLB has any, that is.
It's by far the most on-topic response thus far, and sure to be a lot more interesting to the three other baseball fans that read slashdot than "I Am Copyrighting Planck's Constant!"
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
I believe that MLB is in the right here. It is their right to claim copyright on "their" stats. That is the ones collected by their employees. If ESPN makes notes of their own stats, then it should be their copyrighted material. Collecting that data is not a super easy task. Someone does actually have to sit there and enter them in. And with the availability to have live in game stats via the web, it goes a step further into protecting their work.
It is still an interesting question though. How is it "public" domain? You can't go to a game for free. You "can" watch a game via internet game updates. But you can't really watch it free on tv except for those few games on local channels. ESPN pays a boat load of money for the rights to show games. So if someone is making money off of someone elses product, do you allow it?
Take this for example. Say I open a site that completely takes all of slashdot's headlines and I turn it into a subscription service. Aren't I in the wrong? After all, slashdot's own reporting is just links to articles not of their own. (usually) I for one think it would be very wrong to make money off of slashdot's work.
as some earlier posts have indicated, the issue is not whether or not facts are copyrightable, or compilation of facts are copyrightable. it is whether or not identities can be used in the promulgation of these statistics/facts. mlb would not argue your right to publish that the modern-day home run record is 73 and it was set by a san francisco outfielder in 2001. mlb (or mlb players association) would argue whether or not you can use barry bonds's names in conjunction with the statistic, because the use of his name may be tantamount to his "sponsoring" the fact's publication. many non-licensed (read: non-EA) baseball games cannot list the names of players, but must instead resort to fictional names, and rely on fan-sites to link the statistics with the names. keep in mind that in this case, the facts are legal and distributed with the game (at-bats, on base percentage, slugging percentage, hits allowed, walks allowed, etc.). only the player identities are withheld.
:)
http://sonsofsamhorn.net/index.php?s=faae4d4fd2d9b b9ef51c54c1852d76cd&showtopic=2966
i still think mlb's position is utterly ridiculous, and hope that (a) the case makes it to litigation, and (b) their position will be struck down. however (a) will probably not happen because the plaintiff (a corporate entity bent on producing profits) will probably settle for a reduced fee or (b) the increasingly-conservative court approves mlb's position and goes on to encourage more nightmarish scenarios that other slashdotters have been posting (a la Grokster).
finally, here is the take from a good die-hard baseball fan site, with lots of sabremetric statistically minded fans. red-sox fan affiliation, so yankee fans may want to avert their eyes.
disclaimer: barry bonds has in no way sponsored this post, nor does the use of his name in any way imply his sponsorship of my post getting a "5, Insightful" rating.
Facts are, generally, not copyrightable (although there are enough people here saying that they might be in the UK, as part of a database, that I'm inclined to think that there are exceptions). In Australia, I was involved (as an employee of a company) in litigation surrounding the copying of a database, and the courts handed down a very specific ruling. The database, and the effort that went into putting it into its current form, was copyrightable, but the information wasn't, and if our company was prepared to inspect the data in its existing form and go to some effort to get it into the form we wanted, we could exploit it without paying royalties.
The court even approved our solution: we printed the entire electronic database (tens of thousands of sheets of that old tractor-feed A3ish sized paper) and hired dozens of typists to re-type it into a new database. It was crazy, but the information in the original was purely factual (no creativity) so couldn't be copyrighted, but the electronic database layout of it was creative, and so we needed to take the raw information and add our own creative spin to it (creating our own database format and re-typing). I suspect that now, ten years on, the courts would recognise that the typists added no creativity, only the database guys and programmers, so based on that old ruling I would imagine an automated dump of the data to our new format would likely be legal.
HOWEVER... This is not the point. In fact, this is SO off-topic that the above two paragraphs, in isolation, deserve modding down as irrelevant.
This issue is about the fact that this fantasy-league crew are exploiting the identities (formed in large part from their statistics) of baseball players without the correct licence. That would be, in some ways, like me making a CG movie with somebody who looked like Mel Gibson, sounded like Mel Gibson, acted like Mel Gibson, was even called "Mel Gibson" in the credits, but had no approval from Mel Gibson himself. That would be obviously wrong (I believe that there are provisions in copyright law that amount to a person "owning the copyright to a detailed picture of who they are", to a certain degree, particularly when it comes to commercial exploitation). So the legal position is likely to be that "nobody owns the statistics, but those statistics combined with a player profile (even if it only consists of a name) is sufficient to potentially be copyrightable because it is a detailed picture of who that person is (in some respect)".
Then it is likely to get back to things like how much of that right was signed over by the players under their contracts. Copyright is separated (roughly, IANAL) into standard copyright (which would be mostly signed away, in this case) and creater's rights (which are NOT EVER transferrable), and so Major League Baseball will (probably) have to make a case that sufficient rights to the identities of the players were signed over under their contracts, and validly so (in a way not prevented by "creater's rights"), for MLB to retain sufficient rights to what would probably be claimable by the individual players had they not signed some of those rights over as part of their player contracts.
This is basically a less extreme version of my Mel Gibson example, and I think both sides have a good case. Personally, if I were in charge of MLB, I'd be saying to myself "Hey, they were paying us 9% of gross! This industry is big business, and everyone currently assumes they need to give us a cut, just for owning this licensing agreement, which we need for our core business anyway! Which idiot stirred this ant nest? FIRED!"
Of course, there's the other possibility, where they want to prevent competition by this fantasy league group and create their own, protected, fantasy league. As a matter of fact, my cynical mind is telling me that this is probably what's going on. Someone's nephew, fresh out of IT college, has mastered enough ASP to write a fantasy league program, and BAM! They're trying to kill off the competition, one injunction at a time.
Kerry Wood tied the strikeout record BEFORE his surgery, smartass. Nice try, and "way to go" to all you ignorami that modded his ignorance as "informative".
I highly recommend that you consider that any event in history is in the public domain. Remember those sci fi stories where the japanese ended up owning Mount Vernon? Or the Jefferson Memorial? Do you feel comfortable knowing that something that happened 70 years ago just isn't yours? That someone is allowing claim to be laid over something so simple as the statistic of Bucky Dent hitting a home run? Or the stats surrounding the Red Sox's 2005 World Series? Those stats aren't yours says baseball, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Personally I say the stats aren't theirs. They freely give those stats away and have for years. Those stats are recorded and reported by fans who watched it, recorded it and in turn gave those scores to newspapers, books and many many other formats for you to enjoy. The public owns these stats. Because someone played the game, because someone provided the stadium and the equipment, because someone provided the dirt on which the game was played does not mean the own the resulting statistics.
If we allow this, we allow someone to own 2+2. And if so, I personally here and now copyright the number five, and baseball can't use it unless they give us the stats and the history that WE own. I seem to remember reading something about the baseball hall of fame, which clearly stated that the game is for the enjoyment of all the fans and the history is ours and ours alone.
Since I last checked, nobody owns history but the public. It's offensive to a sport I love and want to share with my family that you think you own a statistic that's burned into my memory, that is as much of my identity as the baseball cap I wear on my head from time to time or the blue of my eyes.
It's an insult to my grandfather who once saw Grover Cleveland Alexander, and my great-grandfather who saw Cy Young pitch.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)