{"id":192180,"date":"2009-05-01T05:05:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T10:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/05\/01\/copyright-maximalists-lose-one\/"},"modified":"2009-05-01T05:05:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T10:05:00","slug":"copyright-maximalists-lose-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/05\/01\/copyright-maximalists-lose-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Copyright Maximalists Lose One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CBS runs a fantasy football league, and the NFL, and NFLPA were threatening a lawsuit over the ownership of the statistics and player names <a href=\"http:\/\/bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601110&amp;sid=aBDcVOXVt01Q\">so CBS got to court first, and won a judgment<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>BS Corp.\u2019s Internet unit won the right to use National Football League players\u2019 names and statistics for free in fantasy sports leagues it sponsors after a judge ruled the information is in the public domain.<\/p>\n<p>A federal appeals court decision in 2007 that companies operating fantasy leagues have a First Amendment right to use names and data of baseball players without paying a licensing fee applies to football as well, U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery said in Minneapolis. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is really basic stuff.  You <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">cannot<\/span> copyright information in the United States, only unique expression or arrangement of that data, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Westlaw\">Westlaw&#8217;s citation system<\/a> for court cases.<\/p>\n<p>The statistics, and the attachment of them to player names, teams, and player numbers, is simply not a unique arrangement or expression of data.<\/p>\n<p>That being said, restrictions of data under an IP regime is the end goal of copyright maximalists, and would make all of society a far poorer place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CBS runs a fantasy football league, and the NFL, and NFLPA were threatening a lawsuit over the ownership of the statistics and player names so CBS got to court first, and won a judgment: BS Corp.\u2019s Internet unit won the right to use National Football League players\u2019 names and statistics for free in fantasy sports &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1134,1109,972,1057],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-ip","category-justice","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}