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?"

Facts?

What, we can own facts now?

Somehow I'm not at all surprised.

Re:Facts?

>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.

Re:Facts?

>Yeah, but you didn't buy a ticket from the corporation organizing the
>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:Facts?

there is no such thing as "right to results"

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.

Re:Facts?

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

Football Facts?

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.

Re:Football Facts?

Oh yeah, sorry should point out that the above is for the kind of football where the ball spends most of its time being kicked around by someones foot rather than being thrown around and caught in someones hands.

Re:Football Facts?

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

Re:Football Facts?

'' SImilary a phone list book typically is protected under copyright law and you can't just copy it, however, the individual phone numbers are not protected. ''

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:Football Facts?

No, actually he's right, at least inasmuch as that the football authorities claim that the fixtures are copyright. The Guardian link [guardian.co.uk] (provided earlier by another poster) is quite informative on the background, which goes back to 1959.

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".

Re:Football Facts?

It's more like sending C&D notices to force small fry to cough up the cash.

Linky [guardian.co.uk]

Re:Football Facts?

In the UK we have an odd law around databases. In the US, traditionally data could not be copyrighted. In the UK, the first person to compile a specific database (think yellow pages) gets a monopoly on that kind of database for a number of years. It's a bit odd really...

Re:Facts?

I always thought cricket was a way to work up a thirst before going to the pub, and the statistics were so the maths geeks (who can't bat to save themselves, let alone field) have something to do. A very democratic sport in that respect.

Radio cricket is an excuse for the commentators to discuss random bollocks (um, not literally) between balls, and televised cricket is pointless because they take it too seriously.

Given that the sort of statistics we're talking about here are closer to what statisticians would normally call data (X scored Y runs in game Z), it would seem obvious to me that it's historical fact, and not copyrightable. But then, I'm not American and don't give a toss about baseball.

what an exciting game! (yawn....)

"Statistics are one of the most important components in baseball"

Remind me to never bother using up any of my life finding out about this game... sounds really exciting ;-)

Re:Facts?

FYI.... '±' is the chinese character for "scholar".

-Lets consider that there are 1.3 billion Chinese.
-Let's assume that .3 billion of them are literate enough to recognize the character. (Might be lower, probably higher.)

So...
-Take .3 billion Chinese using the '±' character an average of once a year.
-Add the 4 Americans using the '±' character when they discuss baseball
-Multiply by your $50 USD per use

= You are a friggin kuai-ionnaire!!!!

Good luck collecting in China though. (The odds say, .... Odds are...., Statistically speaking... Your still poor.)

Re:Facts?

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.

Re:Facts?

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Re:Facts?

That would be silly.

Of course I could argue that a cop can't write me a speeding ticket because i own the copyright in how fast i was travelling.

Re:Facts?

Better yet. Have him write the ticket and then collect royalities twice the amount. Actually make money speeding :)

Ooooooh

I got dibs on planck's constant!

That's nothing!

I bought Avagadro's Constant and the Hubble Constant off eBay, and I own stock in e, pi and the golden ratio.

Re:That's nothing!

Unfortunately for you, the value of pi has decreased since you bought stock in it. Sucker!

Re:Ooooooh

Unfortunately, Microsoft has beaten you and patented 1 and 0. [theonion.com]

Re:Ooooooh

I probably get Heisenburg's Uncertainly Principle!

Re:Facts?

There have always been stupid people and there always will be. The question is who are the more stupid, those whos ideas are insanity manifest or we who allow such fools to be elevated to positions of power and authority? I will give you two quotes in the context of which my feelings will be self evident.

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.

Re:Facts?

The current concept of "copyright" dates to the printing press.

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.

Re:Facts?

Ask your GrandGrandGrandGrandGrandGrandMa

Which one? I have 64 of those.

Re:Compilations of facts

Not since Feist v. Rural Telephone Service. Facts compiled without any creativity are not copyrightable. The case I mentioned above was specifically about copying phone books wholesale, and the Supreme Court ruled that the phone book could not be copyrighted.

Rights in databases, not in facts

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:Facts?

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 [legalaffairs.org]

Re:Facts?

No, you can't copyright facts or even collections of facts. SCOTUS has decreed that Copyright doesn't attach to them in the 1991 landmark decision of Feist v. Rural [wikipedia.org].

The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (that is facts, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author.

Re:Facts vs. Database

Importantly, Feist v. Rural was a case about databases (phone books, specifically). Before Feist, courts used a "sweat of the brow" rule, which meant that anyone who invested significant effort into creating a work was entitled to copyright protection for that work. In their unanimous ruling, the Court reversed this precedent in Feist.

It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression.

Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O'Connor concludes, "the sine qua non of copyright is originality".

Congress is considering new legislation to "protect" databases, thus effectively nullifying the ruling in Feist.

Of course, the MLB does not *have* to sell this data to anyone if they don't want to, and they could stop licensees from redistributing the data under contract law. But they can't stop other people from collecting this data and selling it. Nor can they enforce their "no recounts or descriptions of this game is permitted without the express written consent of MLB and $TV_STATION" clause either. No one owns facts.

Stupid.

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

Crazy me

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.

Not the weirdest

There was a case in Texas, where building codes were copyrighted. In Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l Inc., No. 99-40632 (5th Cir. 2002) [perkinscoie.com] the 5th circuit found that once the law was enacted, that the law once enacted became public domain.

Or it took an appeals court to rule that a cow is not a motor vehicle [ernietheattorney.net].

What the Slashdot community thinks

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.

Re:What the Slashdot community thinks

No, he's serious.

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.

Poll

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.

That's stupid

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©...

Re:That's stupid

From the page you linked to:

"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