Rugby Union legal battle brewing as players set to fight for right to 'data' | Hacker News Reader

Rugby Union legal battle brewing as players set to fight for right to 'data'

rugbypass.com

25 pointsrusk5 comments

It'll be interesting to see where this one goes.

To my non-lawyer sensibilities it seems that while they might have claims on data protection and FOI terms, I don't think they can claim copyright, or ownership based on the claim that they "create" the data.

And one other thing:

"If a club believes a player to be prone to say concussion, they may well not wish to sign him."

This sounds fair enough to me!

> This sounds fair enough to me!

Furthermore it would be negligent in my mind to put them in a job where they might suffer more concussions.

It seems to be a mix of personal, professional and medical information, some of which will be permitted under GDPR (e.g. an employer recording LOC written by an employee is surely permitted). The outcome will be interesting to get a better understanding of how privacy law now works

The medical history thing I can understand. However, for the GPS-unit-collected data, I wonder if a player should just refuse consent. Or if a league can require consent to play if they are sharing that data to users. Hypothetically (though it may exist like it does for many other sports), say I'm watching a diagram based representation of a Rugby match as a normal consumer. Do these players believe they can refuse to allow the public use/sharing of movement tracking? How about when they score a try? Who owns that data? Where does it end? I think the middle ground is all data is made publicly available (as agreed to by leagues and player unions), or if it is not considered public data for end consumers then it subject to explicit approval by the player before being shared.

I'd imagine the ground it'll be settled on is that if you're contracted to work for someone, the employer owns transferable rights to the work you do, including derived data analysing your performance. Particularly when the nature of your work involves thousands of people and television cameras watching so you can't legitimately claim any privacy rights have been violated. Some of the data referenced like evidence of concussion problems is near impossible to suppress given statutory head injury assessments and minimum rest periods

Frankly, it seems like a waste of time: commercial third party analytics have been around for years in other sports where they represent much better performance indicators and lead to much bigger salary differentials, and even in the unlikely event they win they'll succeed only in having standard contracts rewritten and players that refuse to share their data being regarded as a bit suspect.

The UK has ended up with oddities before, like association football scores technically being the intellectual property of licensing troll FootballDataCo, which still picks up revenue despite its copyright claims being ruled unenforceable by European courts. But it's unlikely to end up with oddities detrimental to the clubs and league.

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