Are game statistics public domain?

Shouldn't that be your ME's job?

 

Funny.

We have the same issues with the local radio station. They'll read, word for damn word, our football recaps during their Saturday morning show. So we stopped posting our web stories until we got in to the office Saturday afternoon.

One of the radio guys asked me what happened to putting our stories on the website around midnight, and I told him we were having server issues (which at the time, we were).

 

It's amazing how differently the saturday morning high school radio show sounded when the radio station couldn't steal our stuff.

The radio doofus, who has the balls to call himself by his initials on the air, doesn't understand radio plagiarism is still plagiarism.

To make matters worse, at the high school game I covered, the school's announcer (who does not work or teach at the school) asked if I had the opponent's roster in numeric order (opponent faxed in a roster in A-B-C order by last name of seniors, then juniors, then sophomores). I did and I gave a copy to the announcer ... who then handed it to the radio doofus.

 

I think you might, because if you gather information on your own, it's yours.

 

I wish I was a naive person but that is not true. I say that because I want present the devil's advocate version that he actually did some work and contacted the stats man. Like I said I wish I was naive enough to think that but I thought I would be different.

 

We've had some problems with local radio doing it as well. Every week their statistics on their little writeups on their site match ours identically and come out a day after they run in the paper. If you have 10 people keeping football stats on field marked off every five yards, you are going to get 10 different totals. Hell even on fields that have every yard line, things still might be different, but nope stats identical.

I think it sort of enters the public domain, but still doesn't change the fact that it's lazy and a shitty thing to do.

 

Doesn't matter if you gathered it. Do some damn research before posting.

 

25-some years ago, in the age before the incredible interwebs, I was working at a small 6-day daily and our local cornfield radio station was doing the same thing.

They would cover one game live every Friday (usually at one of our three closest schools) and get phone-ins from a couple others, then the rest of the games they would read straight out of our paper the next morning. Word for word, including quotes. They got the paper delivered before sunrise to their front porch.

They also did a lot of promo ads, "Get the biggest scores first!!" and a lot of snarky local talk about, "why wait around for the newspaper?"

Finally I got sick of it. One week we had a HUGE game in the county between two big rivals. I think they were ranked No. 1 in Class C and Class D respectively. I went and covered the game myself. I noticed they had nobody there -- not even a guy calling in a phone report. It was an awesome game with a last-second score. The home team "Cornville" won, preserving their No. 1 state ranking.

I got back to the office, wrote up the story, laid out the page, sent the paper off to the press.

While the presses were running off the regular press run, I rewrote the story, beginning to end.

Reversing the winning and losing team and turning the game into a shocking upset loss.

By the time the press run was done, we had another plate ready. The pressmen threw it on and ran off 50 copies or so.

We picked out the best one and took it by hand back to circulation with express orders to make sure THAT PAPER got delivered to Radio Station WDIK. And it did.

At 6:00 that morning, I roused myself out of bed and turned on the radio. Sure enough, "Prep Football Scoreboard" was on WDIK.

"And now, let's check in with the big battle at Cornville between the host Huskers and the visiting Hooterville Hound Dogs. In an amazing game, the Hound Dogs ran off a 42-7 upset, dashing Cornville's chances at the state playoffs."

Then, word for word, my complete bogus story, 20-some inches of it. On and on and on.

Then as soon as the sportscast was over, the two "morning coffee" guys started going on and on about what a shocking upset it was. Then, at 6:30, they read the whole thing over again. Then again at 7 a.m. Then again at 7:30.

This went on for THREE HOURS -- apparently in those days they had no Saturday receptionist and nobody answered the outside phone lines until 9 a.m.

So apparently at about 9:01, the GM of the station walked in and noticed the entire row of phone lines lit up.

He punched the first button and heard something very much like, "what the fuck are you talking about, are you on crack, Cornville won that game 27-21 you stupid shit."

And about 100 screaming irate callers right behind him.

So by about 9:20, they sent somebody out to buy another copy of the paper and started sputtering stuff about "technical difficulties."

By about 10 a.m., Mr. WDIK GM was on the phone to our publisher, threatening to sue.

"Go fuck yourself" was the response.

 

It's funny bringing up the team statistician. One time a player from a school I covered was preparing and sending out recruiting info and asked if he could use my stats instead of the team's because he thought mine were more accurate (of course that probably meant they just benefited him more). So maybe the guy just thought apeman's were better. Likely he just stole them, but maybe he was being complementary! At least this player asked me for permission. Who knows what the rules are on such things. We all know if three different people are taking stats at a high school football game there will be three different tallies and sometimes by large margins. I think a quick call or email asking would have been the right thing to do, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

 

nope, stats are public. too lazy to look it up. i will later, but stats are public.
don't care about how it infringes upon anybody's morals ... they're public in the bigger scheme of life.

 

If you're doing an NFL feature and you pull stats off Yahoo sports or wherever, there's no reasonable expectation that you attribute to Yahoo. Nobody owns stats. I know it seems different when it comes to preps, but it really isn't.

 

Wow.

This post is just great.

And it's something I wish we could do, but we only put our football recaps (I'm talking 10-15 inches, tops, with no quotes) online each week. Maybe we could put fake stories on the web, then after we get in, put the real recaps on there. I doubt our higher ups would like it too much, though.