Are game statistics public domain?

What's really fun is when you get down on the goal line. I had a game a few years ago where the ball was clearly inside the 1, but the team could still make a first down inside the 1-yard line without scoring. For statistical purposes, the line of scrimmage was the 2, even though the ball was maybe a foot from the goal line.

 

If we're stressing about the 34 and the 35 and a half yard here or there, I think we're missing the point of why we're out there. Football stats compiled on the sidelines on the back of a clipboard on deadline and in weather have and always will be all over the place. We're journalists, not statisticians, and from my experience, the one's who focus on the trees often don't see the forest very well. If you can take reasonably accurate high school football stats, get a good story and make deadline you'll make friends on your desk quick.

 

I think many of us are arguing the same point, just in different ways.

And I do think stats are public domain. There are many times that my area teams will wait to see/view our boxscores from the game in the paper before they upload them to the state high school association.

Where I have a problem is:

1) Radio stations reading recaps on-air verbatim (which may include wrong stats if we tallied them up wrong OR have wrong names if we later find out Joe Schmo was wearing a different jersey than the roster we got in July/August).

2) Rival monthlies running our stat leaders, including misspellings or wrong school (put PC for Podunk County when instead it should be P or PI for Podunk Independent). Even though my area includes three counties -- including one of which is not in the monthly's publication area -- the monthly will run our compiled stat leaders verbatim. Even though they don't include many of the monthly's counties (because other papers in the region don't compile stat leaders like we do and monthly is too lazy/doesn't have manpower to do it themselves).

At least the first part has a workaround. We can set our prep football recaps to a certain upload time (say 10:30 a.m. Saturday) after the Saturday morning prep roundup radio show goes off the air.

 

Anybody who thinks high school stats, taking solely by the reporter, are public domain for anyone to steal without attribution, has clearly never taken stats on deadline in the fucking rain, then added them up and slammed them into the paper three minutes before close, then climbed over the fence because the janitor locked you in the stadium because he was too lazy/annoyed to stick around, then driven home an hour on an empty stomach because the only nearby restaurant -- McDonalds -- closed three minutes before you got there.

Seriously, screw you if you've ever snatched up somebody's stats and shrugged your shoulders. If the reporter wasn't there compiling them, you wouldn't have them. If you get them from the team, fine. Steal them from the paper? Get fucked.

 

But once you consider stats to be a copyrightable product, don't you call their accuracy into question? You're in essence telling the world "this is our unique interpretation of the facts" as distinct from "these are the facts". That gets into pretty dicey territory, it seems.

Pulling this out a bit more, should the NFL be allowed to copyright their stats and force newsgathering organizations and the general public to get their permission before using them? Hell, they'd have a better case because those are the "official" stats. But I seem to remember a hue and cry over that one here.

 

I would call into question every single high school stat ever kept, frankly. Especially in football, and so would any sane person. The idea that any high school stats have some "official" standard in football is total farce, as anyone who has ever spent a Friday night compiling them can attest, when 50 percent of the coaches don't even know whether they should subtract yardage lost on sack from team passing or team rushing. (God save you if someone completes a hook and lateral.)

Team stats -- kept by the official stat boy or stat girl -- can be, and probably are, public domain.

But stats that appear in the paper, ones compiled by the reporter who was there in person, are absolutely an interpretation of what happened. It's completely different when there is an official designated body present to make sure the same standards are followed at every event. The reality is, not all teams keep good, or accurate stats. And if my paper has a reputation for keeping really good stats, that's a tangible reason to buy my paper. Our standards for accuracy and clarity -- and our willingness to send reporters into the field to cover as many games as accurately as possible -- is part of what make our paper good, and another paper less so.

If you weren't there, call the coach or the athletic director and get the stats from them. Otherwise, you have no reasonable explanation for just taking the stats. What if Jayson Blair was covering that game, and got drunk just made up the stats? Your sloppy journalism has resulted in repeating a falsehood.

I find it baffling that some people here see this as no big deal.

 

Look, everyone knows that high school football stats are ambigous things in the best of circumstances. But the last thing you want to do is advertise, even to an extremely limited audience, that your stats aren't honest-to-goodness facts. Saying "you don't get to use these numbers because they're ours ours ours" does that.

I don't think anyone's advocating taking just stats from a competitor. My first full-time job was for an evening paper in the shadow of a much larger morning daily, and not only did we take the boxscores from their roundups every day as directed by the sports editor, he actually told the coaches not to bother calling stuff into us because we could get it from the big paper. Now that's a *little* different because the stats themselves are provided by coaches and not reporters, but I still felt skeevy doing it. Still, the new kid wasn't going to be heard, so we kept doing it until he was booted and someone else came in to rebuild the relationships with the coaches and ADs. And certainly any attempt to take unique editorial content and call it your own should be pursued hard. Can't imagine anyone would disagree.

But there's a difference between "lazy" and "copyright infringment." If you want them copyrighted, you lose the right to call them facts because those can't be protected.

 

Bingo.

Double bingo.

 

had the best first amendment minds in the nation (USA) working on this in a previous life, and the answer was the basic box score/game summary was NOT copyrightable. in short, if a thing could be expressed in only one way (how many hits, how many goals, etc) then there was no protection (phone numbers and the white pages were the court case; stats inc vs nba fits in here too).

if you created a NEW stat, you could copyright the formula and then license it (zero practical application though). but the box score as we know it was beyond protection.

 

One of the big papers around here takes high school box scores via a proprietary website, and then publishes that data online -- much of it web-only. We have been debating for years whether it's OK to swipe that material and use it in our daily roundups.

We wouldn't be taking the full box, just highlights, which we still accept via phone.

After several years of "hell no, that's plagiarism" we're leaning toward "yes" right now, if only because many coaches are forwarding the same game reports to us via the other site.

I remain hesitant, because all it takes is one repeated (stolen) error and it'll be blatantly obvious how our high school roundup has miraculously grown. Also, I wouldn't like another media outlet (hi, Patch in every freakin' town!) to do the same to us.

 

RE: radio folks

At least a few are honest about it.

I got to the pressbox for this week's game and nodded hello to the PBP guy for the team I was covering. He held up a copy of the sports section with my game preview and said, "Thanks for putting my pregame show together for me."

 

You must not have listened to much Larry Munson as a younger person.