CBS Goes To Court To Let The NFL Know That You Can't Copyright Player Stats

from the and-it's-correct dept

Wed, Sep 10th 2008 10:11am — Mike Masnick

Over the past few years, there have been a series of lawsuits concerning whether or not fantasy baseball operators need to license player info from Major League Baseball. Major League Baseball lost at every level and an eventual appeal to the Supreme Court was turned down. However, it appears that the National Football League wanted to ignore these rulings, and has still been trying to get fantasy sports sites to pony up to use stats and player info -- despite the fact that you cannot copyright facts. CBS is now challenging the NFL on this, and has gone to court to get a declaratory judgment that it doesn't need a license. It's difficult to see this case turning out any differently than the MLB cases, considering the facts of the case are almost identical.

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Filed Under: facts, fantasy football, football, sports, stats
Companies: cbs, mlb, nfl

24 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2008 @ 10:51am

the NFL
Its all about the fans . . . right?
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John, 10 Sep 2008 @ 10:55am

Its
Why can't they copyright plays like other performances?
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Ryan, 10 Sep 2008 @ 10:59am

they can
they can copyright the performance and the plays (if they wanted to)

But what they can't copyright is fact.

Even if a movie is copyrighted, i can say "actor X spoke Y lines and had 56 minutes of face time on screen"

That's a fact, and it can't be copyrighted.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:06am

I still can't understand why the NFL would do something so stupid as to piss of the fans, the only people that make their life possible... If not for Fantasy a lot of people would stop following football all together. Instead of watching 5 or 6 games on a Sunday I would only maybe watch 1 (my local team). Just seems stupid to go after the fans, maybe they should cut back on player salaries and their overhead wouldn't be so high.
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6fingeredjake, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:10am

What A Coincidence
The NFL has recently launched their own fantasy football on their official site... I wonder why they waited until now to try and stop others from running fantasy games on their sites?

I can't think of a $ingle Rea$on.
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Dave Zawislak, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:19am

The new sports report - the ideal revision
A game was played somewhere and one of the teams won unless it was a tie. This was repeated in a number of places.

No mention of scores, teams, outcomes, cities or anything. Nothing even that it was football. See how long the season will be then.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:28am

what we need
What we need is a law that says if you make a false copyright claim you may be penalized just like someone would for a copyright violation. There are a lot of gray areas around copyright, so copyright owners would be hesitant to step into them. In practice, most of the gray areas should go to fair use. Objectively, society would benefit if the gray areas are fair use.
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Ryan, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:33am

re: what we need
We need that for a lot of things:

Rape
Patents
DMCA takedowns
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:49am

Re: they can
So then you could, in theory, describe the plays down the everyone's last movements and you would just be reciting facts.
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Fushta, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:52am

CBS is Big
It's nice to see somebody taking on the NFL on this issue. CBS is big enough (i.e. wealthy enough) to take on the financial hit.

Mike keeps saying that facts cannot be copyrighted (with good reason), but wouldn't it be a surprise to get a judge that thinks otherwise? If the NFL didn't have a game, the facts wouldn't exist. Therefore, since the NFL teams/player "created" the facts, they own the rights to said facts.
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ehrichweiss, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:57am

Re: Re: they can
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. You see, the hard part is going to be that you're going to have to also state everyone's lines and from that you'll fall under the "no derivative works" clauses and fair use won't cover your ass if you've quoted the entire play word for word.
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Michial, 10 Sep 2008 @ 11:58am

Its all about the fans
If NFL had any care what's so ever for the fans Jerry Jones would not be allowed to use Taxes collected from the local area to build his new stadium, then come along and charge $16000 or more JUST for the privilage of buying a $400+ per game season ticket....

When the announced the new stadium was being built, I had hoped to finally get the chance to buy season tickets to see the Cowboys play. Damn was I wrong, even if I could afford $400 per seat per game there is no chance in hell of paying the $16000 per seat for the privilage..

What he has done for me is turn me against the game completely and now I won't even watch the cowboys on TV.

I hope the NFL dies and burns in hell, it's lost grasp of the fact that the fans built the game long ago.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2008 @ 12:01pm

Re: CBS is Big
so you're saying that even though the nazi's killed millions, we can't record them in history books without the expressed written consent of Adolf Hitler? weird...
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Sep 2008 @ 12:30pm

This is an area where a declaratory judgement lawsuit seems quite appropriate and where US Copyright Law operates in favor of the position posited by CBS (i.e., mere "facts" per se are not protected by copyright in the US).
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fprintf, 10 Sep 2008 @ 1:04pm

Godwin's law has been invoked
No more comments please. Godwin's law has been invoked.
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y8, 10 Sep 2008 @ 1:05pm

Just the facts
Maybe MLB can sue the NFL for copying the facts from their suite?
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Trav, 10 Sep 2008 @ 1:14pm

It was not the NFL, it was the NFL Players Association.
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jhunter, 10 Sep 2008 @ 2:15pm

Re: Its all about the fans
They are doing something right, I guarantee they sold the tickets you would have bought to someone else at the price they were asking.

I thought people here were about free market.

Seats are a scarce good, they are being sold at a price people are willing to pay (not a price YOU are willing to pay).
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jhunter, 10 Sep 2008 @ 2:16pm

Re: What A Coincidence
Ironically the fantasy football on nfl.com is really just CBS's fantasy football, it even says "Powered by CBS Sportsline" in the corner.
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Howard_NYC, 10 Sep 2008 @ 2:48pm

I am suing the NFL
the use of "National" in their self-applied title is a falsehood, given how few cities have teams...

also, the USA was a nation before there was an NFL and therefore has copyright...

this should be a profitable sort of lawsuit... next up... NBA, NHL, NBC, ...skies the limit... tee hee...

...not that I'm a lawyer or another of the lifeforms parasiting off the body economic
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J-Man, 10 Sep 2008 @ 4:25pm

Copyright plays? What about maneuvers?
Could the US Army copyright a "play" like an L-shaped ambush and then make the Russian army pay in order to use it during their field exercises and operations?
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dweingus, 10 Sep 2008 @ 8:53pm

Re: Copyright plays? What about maneuvers?
Plays and maneuvers are not facts. they are ideas someone thought of.

QB X threw 13/18 for 151 yards and a TD is a fact, not an idea, and cannot be copyrighted.
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eleete, 11 Sep 2008 @ 4:26am

Re: they can
That may not be exactly true in some instances.

What made this case so difficult is that while a lexicon is a compilation of facts, and you can't copyright facts, Rowling's books are invented facts, hence original and inventive. So a compilation of her invented facts isn't the same as a compilation of facts about World War I or Elvis, or any other actual event or person.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080909014304275
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Sep 2008 @ 8:22am

Re: re: what we need
"We need that for a lot of things:

Rape"

To knowingly make a false rape report is already a crime and a pretty serious one.
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