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Comment by arscan | Hacker News Reader

I'm frankly surprised that this information is allowed to be distributed. I spent awhile in the financial services industry, and while it was really easy to obtain "public" information like stock quote data, I recall that we weren't allowed to simply scrape data from public sites... we had to pay a license fee to get a feed of the data if we were planning on repackaging & distributing it.

It seems to me that the NFL would want to have exclusive rights to distribute this data and charge people a fee for access to it. Clearly I'm no expert in these legal affairs though.

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Generally speaking, stats are public domain as they are a public event that occurred. Because a sports league may disagree with this position doesn't mean that it isn't true. However, its entirely possible to violate a given site's TOU by scraping the data, it doesn't mean the data itself isn't allowed to be compiled or distributed.

IANAL, but I worked at ESPN and founded Fanvibe (YC S'10), and worked quite a bit with the leagues and lawyers on rights-related topics.

IANAL, but I asked one about this while ago; let's see if I can remember: It's complicated. The NFL broadcasts are copyrighted, and come with a statement that (among other things) distributing descriptions of the game is not allowed. That could be considered a derivative work.

On the other hand, a live performance is generally not protected from copyright, so if you attend a live game to collect the data, you may be in the clear.

The data isn't owned by the NFL, but all recordings of the games are, and so any data obtained by watching recordings of the games could potentially be controlled by the NFL.

IANAL too, but the NFL lost a relatively recent court case regarding fantasy football that, as far as I am aware, made the leagues statistics public knowledge as long as you compile the information yourself. Therefore the main legal issue with this data would be the source.

It might not even violate the NFL's copyright if extracted from tapes. For one thing, something is only a "derived work" for copyright purposes if it's a "creative work" subject to copyright at all, and in the U.S., data sets comprising factual information aren't typically considered "creative". For another, it's not clear whether data about a recording is derived from the recording for copyright purposes. For example, a re-edit or mash-up of a film is clearly a derived work, but is a count of how many minutes each character speaks a derived work? Or is a Spotify-style algorithmic analysis of a song's musical style a derived work of the song?

I wouldn't want to put a large bet on where exactly those lines are drawn, though.

IANAL, but there was a landmark case where the NBA sued Motorola and STATS Inc. for distributing live game statistics. The ruling ended up in favor of STATS, where the decision was pure facts could not be copyrighted.

The NFL is not near as strict as MLB (note how you never see an MLB highlight on youtube?) yet MLB allows http://retrosheet.org/ to exist. I don't believe it's technically "dissemination".

Edit: I should note that even http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ contents are governed by http://gdx.mlb.com/components/copyright.txt which doesn't allow commercial use.

MLB are extremely strict, but it's an exaggeration to say "you never see highlights on youtube", I've watched them there many times. Likely either before they got taken down or because they were to small to care about, but there'll still be plenty on there. 5 second search brought up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZW7448mh94 right away as a very quick example.

I'd love to believe that this data falls underneath the "Facts are not copyrightable" decision: http://chart.copyrightdata.com/c16B.html

Facts are not copyrightable, but databases (compilations of data) are.

IANALTINALA.

Lets pretend he got it from memory.

Fun fact: In the UK even the FA Premier League fixture list is copyrighted, and websites or publications wishing to publish all or part of the fixture list for a given season need to pay a licence fee.

I can't even give you a list of football fixtures coming up this weekend without breaking copyright law.

That was true but there have been some recent developments so I'm not sure if it is still the case.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17218968

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