> The district court held that Motorola and STATS did not infringe NBA's copyright because only facts from the broadcasts, not the broadcasts themselves were transmitted. The Second Circuit Court agreed with the district court's argument that the "[d]efendants provide purely factual information which any patron of an NBA game could acquire from the arena without any involvement from the director, cameramen, or others who contribute to the originality of the broadcast" [939 F. Supp. at 1094].
It’s a really fascinating line that the court drew. The concept that a certain player scores a 3 pointer with around 2 seconds left on the clock is clearly a fact knowable to every patron. But what about the exact location from which they took the shot? What about the number of milliseconds the ball was in the air, or the angle at which the shot was launched? These are facts that mere humans cannot access with accuracy; they require the involvement of cameras, camera operators, and other entities characteristic of a copyrightable expression of the fact. If I were to use these to create a 3D simulation of a game, would that not be a derivative work of the film from which I obtained sufficient facts to make that simulation? Where do we decide that pixels on a video feed are more special than other parts of the content?