Are game statistics public domain?

If everyone's doing the stats right, shouldn't they pretty much be the same anyway? At least theoretically?

 

Well, you can't do it now because you have no way of knowing that only your intended victim is going to see the bogus story. If you put a bogus story online for 10 seconds, somebody can copy and link it, and you're fucked.

Mr. Publisher OKed the idea ahead of time (he was pissed about the radio station ripping us off too) but he ordered me to make sure no other copies got outside the building. (I have one stashed up in my attic somewhere.)

Mr. WDIK-GM kept on blustering about suing for a week or so. Mr. Publisher shut that shit down quick: "On what grounds? We induced you to erroneously plagiarize us?"

Apparently Mr.-GM was of the opinion it was a crime punishable by law to publish something known to be untrue.

Strangely, he didn't show up at any of the rotary-club lunches or downtown coffee-club gab sessions for a while. It was quite the laugh riot when the farmers from Cornville came rolling in.

Bottom line, it never would have happened if they hadn't been running the goddamn neener-neener promo ads harping "why buy the newspaper."

Finally Mr.-GM gave up the idea of any action against us when we threatened to run a big front-page story documenting how their local news and sports shows consisted simply of reading straight out of newspapers (particularly us). We had taped a couple dozen of their shows, matched them up to the newspaper copy of that morning's editions, and we could have dropped the bomb on them. Not long after this whole fiasco Mr.-GM got sent somewhere else in the radio chain (not sure if this was the reason or not -- he was a fuckup in a lot of other ways), so the whole thing was dropped.

When the new WDIK GM came in, the neener-neener ads went away, and WDIK agreed to at least name-check us on stories they read out of the paper. Everybody happy.

 

This, this right here.

Think about it this way. If you wrote the preview for a high school game and the paper in the visiting team's are took really good box scores, would you really ignore the trove of information because they took the boxes? No, probably not. Same goes for stats on maxpreps.

 

Starman's story: First-ballot SportsJournalists.com HOF'er.

 

Third world problems (It's Kentucky).

 

OK, so I think we have pretty much come to the conclusion that there was nothing illegal about this. Illegal, no. Shitty, yes. If nothing else, I would make sure he knows that you know what he did.

"Look, pal . . . It was a shitty rainy night . . . no one wanted to be there . . . I know we are all understaffed, but at least check with me before you go running my stats. Maybe we can work out a deal, but I have to get something in return. I work for ABC, not XYZ" It doesn't have to be nasty, unless they make it nasty. After all, they are the guilty ones here.

We work in a different age now, and while partnerships, on whatever level, used to be frowned upon, it's where we are at now if we want to better our coverage with half or less than half the people.

I guess that since this was a competing weekly, and I don't know how fierce the competition is, a partnership is really not possible. but it shouldn't be as easy as picking up the local competition for this hack to do his job.

 

It's stats. If people are getting pissy about other outlets taking your stats, their product must by lousy.

 

Hear, hear!

 

Oh, hell, one place I worked a radio guy would read my stories verbatim on his morning show. I rarely heard it because I'm not a morning person. But one morning I had to set my alarm for something and I heard him doing his report and thought "damn, that sounds familiar". Sure enough, I checked a few more times and he did it every stinkin' day. I didn't raise a fuss, because I figured, hey, we print a newspaper for the public to buy and read. So what difference does it make if someone reads it into a microphone?

 

I would consider sports stats in the same manner as any other stats: stock prices, unemployment figures, voting totals, etc. So, yeah, public domain, cannot be copyrighted.

 

In most cases yes, but in football there are going to be times when rushing and passing yards will be slightly off. A player is tackled at the 34 1/2 yard line and you give him credit for four yards and the guy next to you credits him with five. The numbers will come out close, but usually off by a yard or so.

 

Most times if there was more than one media membe at a game, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this, we'd compare and usually adjust to make them match up.