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.
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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?
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
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.
The new national sport will be soccer soon until the soccer players become overpaid, whiny, wimps too.
Welcome to England
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
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.
"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 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.
It's even worse in England. Here the League claim copyright on fixture lists: put your club's future games on a fan site and expect your ISP to receive a takedown notice.
Remind me to never bother using up any of my life finding out about this game... sounds really exciting
You don't pick the ball up?
Sheesh, you silly Europeans! That sport will *never* catch on.
The claim is presumably based on the principle that the fixtures are "created" and therefore subject to copyright. If you accept that, then why should other companies be able to profit from that act of creation without recognising the rights of the creators? I imagine that this would be particularly persuasive in the case of a pools company like Littlewoods, whose entire business model was based on the football fixtures list, yet didn't really put anything back into the game at all (at least not on a corporate level: in fact, members of the Moores family, who own Littlewoods, have been involved in the ownership of both Liverpool and Everton football clubs - Everton are the other big football club in Liverpool, for the benefit of non-UK readers - at various times).
Of course, the contrary point of view would be that compiling a fixture list is simply a cost of doing business for the football industry at large, and that any publication of fixture dates is a form of publicity for which the game should be grateful. This, however, would be inconsistent with the prevailing attitude in football, which is wring every last penny out of anyone they can by whatever means are available.
It may be that the status quo only holds up because no-one has challenged the 1959 case. After all, the sort of media outlet which publishes the entire fixture list for every club (i.e. national newspapers, football magazines and websites etc.) probably regards £6000 (the figure mentioned in the Guardian) as small potatoes compared to the aggravation of going to court. Legal action only ever seems to be threatened against these one-man-and-a-dog sort of operations.
The key difference between the situation here and what MLB is trying to do, though, is that baseball stats are matters of historical fact. 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".
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.