Sports scores to be copyrighted!?

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Want to grade that NBA game? Better pay the NBA for the score first.


Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine

Ostensibly, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261) makes it a crime for anyone to copy and redistribute a substantial portion of data collected by commercial database companies and list publishers. But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts -- stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. The bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry, opponents say.
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An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date.
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...the bill puts no limit on the amount of information someone needs to take from a database to violate the law.
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A 1997 case between Motorola and the National Basketball Association could serve as an example. After Motorola sent basketball scores to its customers' pagers, the NBA sued the company for misappropriating its property. A U.S. Appeals Court, however, ruled against the NBA.


Full Article: Wired: Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine

[This message was edited by Adam Selene on March 03, 2004 at 12:22 PM.]
 

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Very misleading title.

Facts cannot be copyrighted (although a particular format could be).

If game scores are obtained individually and rebroadcast, there is no copyright infringment. Now, if you took a picture of Goldsheet.com's archives for a team's whole season, and copied it with the same formatting (and mistakes), that could get you in trouble.
 

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That's true of existing copyright law, yes. This is not existing copyright law, but a proposed law covering specifically the information contained in commercial databases, not the presentation.

http://thomas.loc.gov/ and type in HR3261 as the bill number.

Upon reading it, I agree that Wired and others have tended towards gross exageration.

However, I do not doubt that the NFL, NBA and MLB would use this bill to again pursue ownership claims of all their data and statistics -- as they have tried before -- and that this bill may be broadly worded enough for them to win.

Of course just another good reason to locate businesses publishing or consuming such information offshore.


Excerpts:

"Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable..."

"In determining whether an unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner, the court shall consider the temporal value of the information in the database, within the context of the industry sector involved."

"This Act shall not restrict any person from independently generating or gathering information obtained by means other than extracting it from a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person and making that information available in commerce."

"Nothing in this Act shall restrict any person from making available in commerce information for the primary purpose of news reporting, including news and sports gathering, dissemination, and comment, unless the information is time sensitive and has been gathered by a news reporting entity, and making available in commerce the information is part of a consistent pattern engaged in for the purpose of direct competition."


On the surface 'independently generating or gathering' the information seems like an easy and universal exemption. However, if extracting the data as republished by a licensee of the database (newspapers, broadcast television, etc) is considered equivalent extracting it from the database then it becomes harder than it sounds.

[This message was edited by Adam Selene on March 03, 2004 at 03:19 PM.]
 

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