Who Owns Baseball Statistics? 609
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?"
Crazy me (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What the Slashdot community thinks (Score:5, Insightful)
Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facts? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not going to weigh in either way here, but thought that was worth bringing up.
That's stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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©...
That's ridiculous! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, do I even need to explain why this is ridiculous? How can publicly broadcasted factual information be property?
Oh, this is a FANTASTIC idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
It's about the identities of the players (Score:4, Insightful)
Complicity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
IANAL but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's ridiculous! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The more important issue is "identities." If they win this suit, tabloids, "entertainment" magazines about celebrities, news sites which talk about celebrities, etc. will all disappear or have to pay royalties for use of the identity of the celebrity. So personally, I'm hoping MLB wins this one, just so I don't have to read about Paris Hilton every other day.
here's one they can keep (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:On the Subject of Baseball (Score:4, Insightful)
That depends (Score:3, Insightful)
If the fantasy league themselves have collected the statistics, then of course the MLB should not get a cent.
Re:Facts? (Score:5, Insightful)
>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.
Re:That depends (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the Slashdot community thinks (Score:4, Insightful)
He wants a bunch of people with no expertise in the area that he's asking about to tell him what to think.
That's why they have "Ask Slashdot," which is where he should have put that.
Re:Facts? (Score:1, Insightful)
Bullshit
1) Do they show a screen of statistics and graphs with an inset of the actual game in the bottom right corner on TV? Why does anyone go to a baseball field when they could more comfortably access all the statistics at home?
2) You obviously haven't heard of cricket.
Re:Phonebook? (Score:2, Insightful)
If i watched the game on tv and printed the stats from it, there is no way i'd ever be convinced i'd have to pay royalties on such information. it's like asking for royalties from me if i were to publish a summary of a book i read.
Facts versus ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's about the identities of the players (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad analogy. Mickey is trademarked all over, not just copyright, precluding most commercial uses of the image. Mickey Mouse is a work of art, not factual. Butif you were writing a critique or review of Mr Mouse's films, you could include a number of stills as fair comment on the factual discussion though. No relation to images of real things or people.
How about stock market statistics then? Forex? (Score:1, Insightful)
Imagine, you wanted to purchase Google stock but before doing so wanted to analyze the last 8 quarters of earnings declarations as well as their stock prices. But alas, you need to buy the statistics before you decide whether to buy the stock or not.
A forex merchant could charge you a fee for their dollar-euro conversion rate, before actually changing your money.
Since such a model monetizes trivial information, guess who'd be interested in dreaming up possibilities? Goo....
yup... they ARE overpaid... (Score:2, Insightful)
Glen Phillips Quotalicious (Score:5, Insightful)
Glen Phillips - August 30, 2005, Jammin Java Cafe'
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BMO
Re:Ooooooh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
What about their criminal records? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facts? (Score:4, Insightful)
>wonder of weather to see it, did you?
Again, so what? You don't have to see something to be able to tell about it. I can tell about a score in a game even if I did not see it just as I can tell the temperature in some city even if I was not there to see or experience it myself.
>Be sure the check the EULA next time you go see a game of baseball! I'll
>bet it says "You are granted a non-exclusive license to enjoy the game
>yadda yadda but the ownership and rights to the results remain the sole
>property of blah blah blaa."
If we disregard that I don't go and see baseball since baseball is basically not played in my country, the point is that there is no such thing as "right to results". It is just plain facts and can't be owned of have any rights any more than you can own the right to the temperature of some place. There is no such "rights". Doesn't matter iof someone claims it. You can claim the right to the temperature in your garden all you want, that doesn't mean no one else can tell about it.
Re:Countering indifference (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Poll (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Football Facts? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more like sending C&D notices to force small fry to cough up the cash.
Linky [guardian.co.uk]
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]). Both the newspaper and the fantasy league are reporting sports statistics for profit making, entertainment purposes. There is no distinction based on profit.
Re:Facts? (Score:1, Insightful)
[1] rather you should.
Re:Not so off-the-wall (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facts? (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I'm not sure where the statistics in question are actually coming from, let's assume that they're from MLB analysts.
If they want to copyright their statistics, fine; I don't think they could stop me from going to a game, taking notes on how many pitches/balls/strikes/etc. there were, and then posting that information on a web site. Suppose a whole lot of people did that, and you would have a separate, uncopyrighted repository of statistics, independent of the MLB ones. I'm not sure how accurate they would be, but I can't see how they could stop you from doing this. I think any attempt to block you would be a pretty clear First Amendment issue.
Re:Facts? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Facts? (Score:4, Insightful)
But the idea that copyright is a property right and that copyright violation is theft is relatively recent.
Economists talk about the positive and negative externalities of economic behaviour. An "externality" is a consequence of an action that is not borne by the person taking the action. Positive externalities are good things that acrue to others through my actions that I do not get paid for. Negative externalities are bad things that happen to others because of my actions that they do not get compensated for.
Property rights are a human invention to minimize negative externalities. If I own property I can prevent others from using it to dump their waste, or from farming it and leaving me with the cost of maintaining it, etc. My property right protects my exclusive use of my property from the negative externalities that others may put upon it. At the same time, they prevent me from putting negative externalities on others.
Copyright is a human invention to protect positive externalities. As someone else has pointed out in a quote from Einstein, if I give you a new idea, you have the idea and I still have it. I have created a benefit for you without significant cost to myself. Copyright is a way of trying to protect in law the benefit I have given you, so that I may capture that positive externality in the form of some kind of payment.
Copyright and property rights are therefore different in kind. Copyright is licenseable (and sub-licensable if the license is written that way) but should not be salable as property. The GPL, for example, treats copyright this way.
Every absurd move in "intellectual property" law in the past couple of decades is fundamentally linked to the notion of ideas of any kind as "property". Once you have granted that notion, any number of insane things follow, including the notion that facts can be property.
The fundamental intellectual fight is to get rid of the idea of "intellectual property", and to explain when it comes up why it is an absurd idea with no historical basis, and an abuse of the term "property" as a false metaphor for what should be a licensing/sub-licensing relationship dealing with a temporary monopoly right that is artificially created to reward the creators of certain types of work to the general benefit of society.
Angering die-hard fans = Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this different from copying the broadcast? (Score:1, Insightful)
There wouldn't be any world series statistics or any baseball records for that matter if the MLB association didn't decide "hey, let's start a league and start playing baseball". Because of what the MLB has done, there are now these statistics and facts for people to gather. They would not exist if the MLB was not formed and doing business.
Now, what about these scenarios are different from gathering detailed statistics about a baseball game?
1.) I watched Scrubs on tv last night, it was funny because JD was turning 30 and decided to run a marathon.
2.) I watched Scrubs on tv last night, everything that the actors said went like this....
3.) I watched Scrubs on tv last night, and oh, here are a whole bunch of facts and statistics in MPEG2 form of what the show looked like...
I'm sure scenario #1 is pretty well protected as not breaking any laws, 2 has been debated with song lyric websites, or even creating your own screen plays from watching a show (I wonder if that is against the law?), and 3 it seems is where copyright law really starts to come in affect.
To me, baseball statistics very loosely almost fall into scenario #2. Depending how they're organized they can give a milding exciting view of the game. You can look at the stats and say "oh look, it was the bottom of the nineth, 2 outs bases loaded, and they hit a grand slam! that must have been a good game"
I say that the MLB might very well have a right to these "facts" since they aren't natural facts of the world, but are information about a very private activity called a baseball game that they privately organized. Does the MLB have one of those hilarious disclaimers that the NFL has? "...any recollections or accounts of this game without prior written consent from the NFL is against the law (or something similar)..." I always laugh when I hear it. I guess the MLB could start having us abide by NDA's as a disclaimer in the ticket purchase, or before the broadcast.
So, I think the MLB *may* be entitled to owning these facts. Do I think it's best for everyone involved if they do? I would say probably not... We'll have to see what happens.
History is in the public domain (Score:3, Insightful)
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.