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?"
Facts? (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow I'm not at all surprised.
Re:That's stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:On the Subject of Baseball (Score:4, Interesting)
(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.)
Re:Facts? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
So, are the stats made up numbers? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Or it took an appeals court to rule that a cow is not a motor vehicle [ernietheattorney.net].
So in a year or so.. (Score:3, Interesting)
cheers,
Loki.
It Depends on Who Did the Recording (Score:2, Interesting)
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/ [eakins.net]
Re:That's stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:On the Subject of Baseball (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Stupid lawyers missed yet another opportunity (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Yeh, lock that shit up, you stupid dumbfscks (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Property is theft. (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) (Score:2, Interesting)
"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.
Re:That's stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
the lahman database [baseball1.com] 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.
Well that wasn't so smart... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
There is a precident (Score:1, Interesting)
On the other hand, if I'm a newspaper reporter and I snap a picture of him, somewhere he shouldn't be, doing something that he shouldn't do, he can't do anything*. That kind of thing happens all the time and the courts have ruled that by becoming a public figure, you lose some rights that the rest of us have.
My guess is that the fantasy league will win this one.
There are a lot of fantasy leagues out there for different sports. Most of them are just a bunch of guys who hang out at the bar together. Good luck controlling them. You can't. What you can do is alienate your fan base. The fans took a long time to forgive the leagues after the strike. This kind of thing will just aggrevate them more. It's kind of like all the good will the riaa wins by suing twelve year olds for their parents life savings and all the money they will ever make in their lifetimes. Once the people feel they are being played for patsies, they will quit buying tickets/albums/whatever.
*Actually he could sue for libel and libel chill is a fact of life; but thats another story.
Compilations of facts (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
control information (Score:3, Interesting)
Rights in databases, not in facts (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.
Re:It's about the identities of the players (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Compilations of facts (Score:4, Interesting)
Football Facts? (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
I think what they're saying here is (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Compilations of facts (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Football Facts? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:That's stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
"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
Re:Facts? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a sneaky proposition, and hopefully the judge will toss it out.
Re:Stupid. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Facts? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Interesting on Many Onion Levels (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Football Facts? Slightly OT (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Numbers Game - MLB and Players tread carefully (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
he who collects the data (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
issue is about copyrighting identity, not facts (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
You've all missed the point. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.