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Who Owns Baseball Statistics?

Posted by Zonk on from the tell-me-of-this-baseball-you-speak-of dept.

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?"

17 of 609 comments (clear)

  1. Facts? by EEBaum · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What, we can own facts now?

    Somehow I'm not at all surprised.

    --
    -- I prefer the term "karma escort."
    1. Re:Facts? by Feanturi · · Score: 5, Funny

      Somehow I'm not at all surprised.

      I happen to own your lack of surprise, it's all right here in this deed. You now owe me $5.00 for each occurrence that doesn't surprise you, or the viewing of anything in your surroundings that appears to be perfectly normal.

    2. Re:Facts? by Pofy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >Bear in mind statistics are one of the most important components in
      >baseball.

      So? It is still just facts. Weather statistics, like the temperature and wether the sun is shining or not is one of the most important components for anyone in meteorology, still doesn't mean no one else can tell about the weather yesterday they read about or saw.

    3. Re:Facts? by jeeperscats · · Score: 5, Funny

      I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

    4. Re:Facts? by galgon · · Score: 5, Informative

      This lawsuit is less about facts and more about players identities. A newspaper saying ballplayer X has a .241 batting average is legal because of freedom of the press and the fact that the newspaper is not using the identity of the player for commercial reasons. However, selling a product, such as baseball cards, with a picture and stats on the back is commercially using the players identity. This is a fine line I know.

      The battle going on here is whether using the players names and stats in a fantasy game amounts to using it commercially or not. This article gives a really good summary:
      http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-Decemb er-2005/argument_schwarz_novdec05.msp

    5. Re:Facts? by chuckT · · Score: 5, Insightful

      IANAL, but there is nothing (unless you agreed to some sort of implied contract when you bought the ticket, but that's another issue...) to stop you going to the game, and keeping track of the statistics. In that sense, surely the information itself is public domain. The compiled information provided by anyone who has actually done that is a different matter, however.

      If I make maps, (for example), I don't claim copyright to the landscape, but I do require payment (and can claim copyright) for the time and effort I put into measuring it and making up the maps. By the same argument, anyone who actually compiles and publishes statistics should have ownership of the data it has taken them time and effort to gather, and should be able to charge for them. If you don't like it, then there is nothing to stop you compiling the data yourself from an original source.

      On a related note, I understand that companies that do this kind of thing often incorporate minor, deliberate errors into the data so that they can identify copying. This could be a dummy entry on each page of the 'phone book, or a slight kink in a minor road on a map, that does not affect the usefulness of the data, but clearly identifies the origin. It can't be easily identified by an outside party either.

      Chuck

      --
      - These are small, *those* are _far away_
  2. What the Slashdot community thinks by dorkygeek · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?
    The Slashdot community thinks: stop ending every story with those stupid questions.

    --
    Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
  3. That's just not cricket by Aussie · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry.

  4. That's ridiculous! by AxemRed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  5. Phonebook? by omega_cubed · · Score: 5, Informative
    They've gotta be kidding!

    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
    Jim Gallagher, a spokesman for Major League Baseball Advanced Media, baseball's Internet arm, declined comment on the lawsuit...
    --
    Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
  6. Oh, this is a FANTASTIC idea! by One+Blue+Ninja · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This *is* Americorp, so of course this idea makes sense. You want people to have access to historical facts, for - FREE?? You communist bastard, somebody should lock you up for even SPEAKING such unpatriotic, un-Americorp propaganda!

    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".

  7. Complicity by Flying+pig · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is surely all part of the celebrity culture thing. "Celebrities" are created by lazy media sources (because, for instance, doorstepping drug addicted models is easier and cheaper than doing serious investigative journalism into drug addiction.) Then the celebrities decide that they no longer want the invasion of privacy...but, if it stops, so will their earnings soon after. In the same way, with artificially hyped games, the team owners want publicity because this creates a television and newspaper audience and so generates revenue, but then they decide that everybody must pay to have access to their "content" - which risks removing the popular activities which generate a demand for the content.

    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
  8. Ooooooh by AoT · · Score: 5, Funny

    I got dibs on planck's constant!

    --
    A blog about stuff.
    1. Re:Ooooooh by dabigpaybackski · · Score: 5, Funny

      I probably get Heisenburg's Uncertainly Principle!

      --
      "OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
  9. You can't copyright raw information by crankyspice · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?c ourt=US&vol=499&invol=340

    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.
  10. Rights in databases, not in facts by john-da-luthrun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:Football Facts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You don't pick the ball up?
    Sheesh, you silly Europeans! That sport will *never* catch on.