I don't think either would fall under copyright. As to the first, the Second Circuit has held (in a widely cited case) that NBA game data is not subject to copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v..... The guiding rule, under the Supreme Court's Feist case, is that facts cannot be protected. What happened at an NBA game is a fact; the fact itself cannot be copyrighted. Only an expression of that fact (an article or radio segment reporting on it) can be protected.
> The district court held that Motorola and STATS did not infringe NBA's copyright because only facts from the broadcasts, not the broadcasts themselves were transmitted. The Second Circuit Court agreed with the district court's argument that the "[d]efendants provide purely factual information which any patron of an NBA game could acquire from the arena without any involvement from the director, cameramen, or others who contribute to the originality of the broadcast" [939 F. Supp. at 1094].
It’s a really fascinating line that the court drew. The concept that a certain player scores a 3 pointer with around 2 seconds left on the clock is clearly a fact knowable to every patron. But what about the exact ___location from which they took the shot? What about the number of milliseconds the ball was in the air, or the angle at which the shot was launched? These are facts that mere humans cannot access with accuracy; they require the involvement of cameras, camera operators, and other entities characteristic of a copyrightable expression of the fact. If I were to use these to create a 3D simulation of a game, would that not be a derivative work of the film from which I obtained sufficient facts to make that simulation? Where do we decide that pixels on a video feed are more special than other parts of the content?
> Where do we decide that pixels on a video feed are more special than other parts of the content?
It comes from the Copyright Act: 17 USC 102 states that copyright protects "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression." It also states that in "no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."
The way this has been interpreted is as a dichotomy between ideas/facts and expression. You might use very expensive equipment to, for example, map the ocean floor. That data cannot be copyrighted. But a video visualization of that data could be copyrighted.
The result is, as you point out, somewhat unintuitive in that case, since generating the data is the hard part, not creating the visualization. But that's where Congress chose to draw the line in order to circumscribe the scope of copyright.
> The result is, as you point out, somewhat unintuitive in that case, since generating the data is the hard part, not creating the visualization. But that's where Congress chose to draw the line in order to circumscribe the scope of copyright.
And then the fun part, where data owners intentionally add false data to catch people. As a false item, it's not protected under the fact exclusion, so any inclusion of it is clear infringement.
Yeah, there are equivalents in the yellow/white pages industry, from what I've heard. That wikipedia page shows that it doesn't always work, but it is an interesting idea.
What if I use the game/player data to make deep learning models for betting predictions? Could I argue that my (as an athlete) decision making process during play is my intellectual property and any attempt to reverse engineer it is prohibited?
To put it another way, if I build a stock-picking algorithm, the “facts” about what trades it makes are public knowledge, but can it be argued that the algorithm can be protected from reverse engineering attempts?
That is pretty fascinating. In horse racing (where paying for past performance information has been standard operating procedure for more than a century), there is (at least in the US) exactly one company that holds and brokers that information, and it is quite a profitable business.
It's interesting that they theoretically can't claim copyright to protect that business.
This sounds like it would be a similar situation to that of maps.
The fact of what physical geography exists cannot be copyrighted. Anyone is free to produce their own map by measuring the physical world. In theory if everyone used accurate measurements, then all maps would be identical. However a map itself can be copyrighted, and producing your own map by copying another for which you don't have permission is illegal.
But how would anyone ever know whether you went out and measured the real world, or just copied someone's map because the underlying data is the same.
Historical horse racing data is the same. You could start gathering all the data by recording the outcome of races, and in 10 years you would have 10 years of historical data. Or you could just pretend you have already done that and actually just copy the data from the other company. The result would be indistinguishable.
'Trap steets' is one way the mapping industry deals with this problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street - So I would not be surprised to find some deliberate mistakes in the past performance data provided by this company, which should they be found in your data set, would be pretty conclusive evidence of the source of your data.
"What colour are your bits" is also relevant and interesting article - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 - Despite what techies would like to believe, the source of your data does matter, even if multiple different sources would actually result in an identical block of data.
