Football Dataco - Copyrighting the game
- Thread starter Foxy
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L
Linz
Guest
Mrs Jagielka said:oh no you should put that too... that would be funneh
Wouldn't look too great if they did decide in their stupidity to take us to court.
A judge would laugh them out of that court, but the FA have enough money that lawyers will convince them to pursue any case.
Get your suit out Foxy
Mousey
S24SU 2019 F1 World Champion
Linz said:Wouldn't look too great if they did decide in their stupidity to take us to court.
A judge would laugh them out of that court, but the FA have enough money that lawyers will convince them to pursue any case.
Get your suit out Foxy
"Supporting Grass Roots Football, Shitting On Proper Fans" New FA slogan?
RIP Niftos
Well-Known Member
Mouseytheblade said:
lol mate....good call
L
Linz
Guest
Been doing some research following the most recent threat from Data Co (namely, court.)
Seems that they haven't really got a leg to stand on as the as yet unchallenged Database Directive 1996 states that Football Fixture lists are not subject to copyright law.
I quote from another source:
If they persist in being arseholes, I've suggested that me and Foxy do the legal equivalent of standing and rodding them to provoke a silly reaction
Not only will they be taking a case which the above states is not guaranteed to succeed (the only case they have in their favour is a 1959 case of Football League Ltd v. Littlewoods Pools Ltd), they'll be opening themselves up to a whole heap of bad press.
At the end of the day, they can afford to allow fanzines to publish fixtures for the nominal sum of £1. So the only real loss they are suffering is £1. We made zero cash from keeping this site running.
Gonna leave it a few days to clarify our legal position and try to do everything we can to avoid going to court, but if it comes down to it, I'm prepared to fight them all the way.
Not like they can sue us for much anyway! The first rule of litigation, follow the money.
Football League have lots, we have none.
Seems that they haven't really got a leg to stand on as the as yet unchallenged Database Directive 1996 states that Football Fixture lists are not subject to copyright law.
I quote from another source:
If they persist in being arseholes, I've suggested that me and Foxy do the legal equivalent of standing and rodding them to provoke a silly reaction
Not only will they be taking a case which the above states is not guaranteed to succeed (the only case they have in their favour is a 1959 case of Football League Ltd v. Littlewoods Pools Ltd), they'll be opening themselves up to a whole heap of bad press.
At the end of the day, they can afford to allow fanzines to publish fixtures for the nominal sum of £1. So the only real loss they are suffering is £1. We made zero cash from keeping this site running.
Gonna leave it a few days to clarify our legal position and try to do everything we can to avoid going to court, but if it comes down to it, I'm prepared to fight them all the way.
Not like they can sue us for much anyway! The first rule of litigation, follow the money.
Football League have lots, we have none.
RaWW
Active Member
Clever girl Linz. Round of applause!!
Take the bastards down!!
Take the bastards down!!
RIP Niftos
Well-Known Member
go linz 
give em a good kickin the shits
give em a good kickin the shits 
- Admin
- #38
We thought this one had gone away, but Football Dataco have now changed tact and are going after people using the badges of their clubs!
Football DataCo Club Crest Infringement 2008/09
I wonder if the Football Supporters Federation want to take this one up. I shall email them and point them in the right direction.
FOOTBALL FOR FANS, NOT FINANCE!
Football DataCo Club Crest Infringement 2008/09
I wonder if the Football Supporters Federation want to take this one up. I shall email them and point them in the right direction.
FOOTBALL FOR FANS, NOT FINANCE!
- Thread starter
- Admin
- #42
I never actually updated with the outcome of the original "issue" did I?
Here it is for those interested:
Basically, NetResults Ltd. (contracted by FootballDataCo to "inspect" the internet for breaches of league and club rights) were concerned by the tone of our response and passed our "case" onto the General Manager of FootballDataCo.
The general manager, took time out to personally contact me regarding the issue.
Basically, he started the email highlighting and mapping out when they had contacted me and how I was in breach of their "rights". He "apologised" if their tone and approach had been "heavy handed" but they had "offered methods of finding more information" and besides found elements of my emails "inaccurate".
He assured me that the leagues have no desire to fall out with fans who decide to create websites in support of their teams, before launching into white knight mode...
Quoting a case they won against Littlewoods Pools (who I'm sure probably do make a little bit more of a profit out of publishing fixtures than I do)... This turned into footballs biggest revenue stream for a bit... blah blah blah... "Most of the UK football stadia were re-equipped with all seating facilities off the back of pools contributions."
Then he explained how due to competition laws it wouldn't be fair to treat fan sites any differently to major newspapers, media corporations, bookmakers etc. If they treat fan sites any differently it would force them to make all sectors free, this would result in a long standing revenue stream disappearing.... "I have spoken to few fans who want to reduce the earnings of their clubs."
Then we got onto our tongue in cheek tactic of removing the fixtures, but displaying anagrams....
He admitted in all honesty, he didn't actually know where they stood legally, despite making it clear in past correspondence that we were breaking the law and infringing on their rights by displaying anagrams which could (with some work) be decifered to make team names. He went on to say, that he'd looked into it and there hadn't been a previous case in UK courts, but they were willing to go to court find out the answer (in order to protect an important revenue stream).
So basically, he ended the email by saying...
You have 2 choices:
1 - Pay us loads of money
2 - Go to court
He hoped I'd make the right choice for the good of the league/clubs and said he'd be grateful if I'd allow him to return to tackling companies.
Basically, I chose my own option, of removing most of the "offending" articles and putting the argument on hold till an undetermined later date.
Here it is for those interested:
Basically, NetResults Ltd. (contracted by FootballDataCo to "inspect" the internet for breaches of league and club rights) were concerned by the tone of our response and passed our "case" onto the General Manager of FootballDataCo.
The general manager, took time out to personally contact me regarding the issue.
Basically, he started the email highlighting and mapping out when they had contacted me and how I was in breach of their "rights". He "apologised" if their tone and approach had been "heavy handed" but they had "offered methods of finding more information" and besides found elements of my emails "inaccurate".
He assured me that the leagues have no desire to fall out with fans who decide to create websites in support of their teams, before launching into white knight mode...
Quoting a case they won against Littlewoods Pools (who I'm sure probably do make a little bit more of a profit out of publishing fixtures than I do)... This turned into footballs biggest revenue stream for a bit... blah blah blah... "Most of the UK football stadia were re-equipped with all seating facilities off the back of pools contributions."
Then he explained how due to competition laws it wouldn't be fair to treat fan sites any differently to major newspapers, media corporations, bookmakers etc. If they treat fan sites any differently it would force them to make all sectors free, this would result in a long standing revenue stream disappearing.... "I have spoken to few fans who want to reduce the earnings of their clubs."
Then we got onto our tongue in cheek tactic of removing the fixtures, but displaying anagrams....
He admitted in all honesty, he didn't actually know where they stood legally, despite making it clear in past correspondence that we were breaking the law and infringing on their rights by displaying anagrams which could (with some work) be decifered to make team names. He went on to say, that he'd looked into it and there hadn't been a previous case in UK courts, but they were willing to go to court find out the answer (in order to protect an important revenue stream).
So basically, he ended the email by saying...
You have 2 choices:
1 - Pay us loads of money
2 - Go to court
He hoped I'd make the right choice for the good of the league/clubs and said he'd be grateful if I'd allow him to return to tackling companies.
Basically, I chose my own option, of removing most of the "offending" articles and putting the argument on hold till an undetermined later date.
So basically, as fixtures are old news now for a few months, they're looking for something else to pick on?
Maybe you could organise a group of all site admins, from the football league (stuff the premiership - unless we get up there), and all go at it together? You all seem to help each other out anyway! Contact the clubs and see what they have to say about it - why should they be concerned? It's all carrying their name - you could see it as free marketing for the clubs!
...but of course, being the minors, you'd still be in the wrong!
Maybe you could organise a group of all site admins, from the football league (stuff the premiership - unless we get up there), and all go at it together? You all seem to help each other out anyway! Contact the clubs and see what they have to say about it - why should they be concerned? It's all carrying their name - you could see it as free marketing for the clubs!
...but of course, being the minors, you'd still be in the wrong!
- Thread starter
- Admin
- #44
There has been plenty of this nature before. Achieves nothing.
I wouldn't go that far.
I've contacted United about a cheaper solution, but nobody wants to deal with it. They also have their own interests to protect and certain people don't like competition to the official site.
!!
- Admin
- #46
I love how they make themselves out to be the protectors of the game, claiming that the majority of the money goes towards lower league clubs.
So they give with one hand... and then take away with the other, condemning Bournemouth, Luton and others to the doldrums because of financial problems.
I put it to them that they consider long and hard about who is ruining the game.
So they give with one hand... and then take away with the other, condemning Bournemouth, Luton and others to the doldrums because of financial problems.
I put it to them that they consider long and hard about who is ruining the game.
Sensiblade
Well-Known Member
Sensiblade
Well-Known Member
Sorry for double post but this is excellent
SotonBlade
Well-Known Member
- Admin
- #49
- Thread starter
- Admin
- #50
It's cheaper now than when the issue was originally raised, but the price currently stands at:
£266 plus VAT to print the fixtures of one English club. For one season, for editorial usage on one website. With pages and pages of terms & conditions.
Other prices:
To publish just text on one website during a match:
At these times: 9 time windows during the match 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 35 minutes, half time, repeated in second half. At extra time there are 3 further windows: 7 minutes, half time, 22 minutes. 3 images in each window. Aggregating to no more than 15 images by end of match or 24 If extra time is played. One text in each window including extra time totalling to 9 in the match and 12 including extra time
GBP1,800.00 (excluding VAT) per season
Text and photos for the same periods = GBP4,200.00 (excluding VAT) per season
£266 plus VAT to print the fixtures of one English club. For one season, for editorial usage on one website. With pages and pages of terms & conditions.
Other prices:
To publish just text on one website during a match:
At these times: 9 time windows during the match 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 35 minutes, half time, repeated in second half. At extra time there are 3 further windows: 7 minutes, half time, 22 minutes. 3 images in each window. Aggregating to no more than 15 images by end of match or 24 If extra time is played. One text in each window including extra time totalling to 9 in the match and 12 including extra time
GBP1,800.00 (excluding VAT) per season
Text and photos for the same periods = GBP4,200.00 (excluding VAT) per season
D
Deleted member 1486
Guest
Who cares? Don't pay them! Bunch of money grabbing fucktards.
Tell them to go fuck themselves. Then when they've finished fucking themselves tell them to fuck themselves again. Bunch of petty-minded, small dick, leaching, snivelling cunts.
You know the fat unpopular kid at school? The one who smelled of cheese because he never had a bath, had scabby feet, a stammer and pissed himself during geography? Well I guarantee you that kid is working for a company just like Football Data Co Limited imagining he's Gordon Gekko because he gets to send out a few threatening emails to a not-for-profit website. Little piss ant.
Bollocks to them, tell them to swivel. If they win the case and shut the site down I'll set up another one tomorrow and promote you both to admin. :thumbup:
RaWW
Active Member
You should seriously get these guys some bad press. Send this story to Sky Sports, I'm sure they'd get on the case. They'd love a story like this.
Flawed, I think your being a little too kind IMO.
Flawed, I think your being a little too kind IMO.
D
Deleted member 1486
Guest
I've just read that case in full (Littlewoods), yeah yeah, I know, it's a slow day.
The majority of the judgment is taken up by the judge considering the "skill, judgment or labour" in compiling the fixture list and he even emphasises that "there can be no copyright in information per se, including that of the predetermination of future events of one's own creation". Subsequent cases even cite Littlewoods as defining that "skill, judgment or labour" in compiling a list of chronological events should/could be considered in deciding if it fell into copyright.
As you can imagine, compiling football fixtures in the 1950s (which is when the case was heard) was a considerably different task than it is today. The compiling of the fixture list fell to one man, a Mr Harold Sutcliffe who was paid by the football league to hand over the copyright of the fixture list after he had compiled it. Throughout the judgment the court gives a lot of respect to Sutcliffe's work (e.g. "The compilation entailed a great deal of work and required a high degree of skill and ingenuity" - one example of many).
A significant proportion of the judgment is given over to detailing the difficulty of compiling the fixture list (which makes for interesting reading, if you're into that kind of thing). It wasn't as easy as just picking 24 teams from a hat and shuffling them around a bit each week. A questionaire is (was?) sent out to all clubs asking who they want to be paired with, when paired with another club you didn't play home games on the same day (example given was: "when Manchester City is playing at home on a given Saturday, it is essential that Manchester United should be playing away. If both are playing at home the gates will suffer" - presumably this was before most of Old Trafford was from the south ... or Asia ... or both). The point is; in a two team city like Sheffield it was pretty straight forward; team A would pick team B and vice versa. That was simple enough to organise but it could also be the case that team A would pick team B and team B would pick team C, and team C would pick team D, etc. So now you have five or six (or more) teams who's fixtures all depend on each other and you have to do this for each match for both the home and away team for thousands of matches each year. This is just one part of the compiling the list, there are numerous examples given of the questions asked of each club (do you have floodlights? are you willing to play under flood lights? which midweek day do you prefer to play on?, etc). Having worked out all this information he would try and build a TYPEWRITTEN (!!!) fixture list as best he could and then consult with the clubs and the league and inevitably changes would be requested and he'd start all over again!!! This brief summary really doesn't do the guy's work justice (no pun intended). Read the judgment for a fuller picture, the detail of his work goes on for pages. He did quite an amazing job.
This was absolutely central to the case. The judge said "the chronological list is produced as a result of the entire skill, labour, time, judgment and ingenuity of the League, their servants and agents. [...] it is not open to the defendants to try and dissect and break down the efforts of Sutcliffe in the way suggested".
These days you feed 20/24 teams into a computer and it spits out the resulting fixtures. Would the court have had as much respect for the (somewhat) random database driven output by a pile of silicon? Open to debate, but I think not.
Might be a bluff, losing a case would cost them hundreds or thousands of "important revenue stream"s where as winning it would be nothing more than a moral victory (its not like thousands of fan sites will suddenly start paying them - they'd just remove the listings, which benefits no-one). Not that I'm recommending you test them
The majority of the judgment is taken up by the judge considering the "skill, judgment or labour" in compiling the fixture list and he even emphasises that "there can be no copyright in information per se, including that of the predetermination of future events of one's own creation". Subsequent cases even cite Littlewoods as defining that "skill, judgment or labour" in compiling a list of chronological events should/could be considered in deciding if it fell into copyright.
As you can imagine, compiling football fixtures in the 1950s (which is when the case was heard) was a considerably different task than it is today. The compiling of the fixture list fell to one man, a Mr Harold Sutcliffe who was paid by the football league to hand over the copyright of the fixture list after he had compiled it. Throughout the judgment the court gives a lot of respect to Sutcliffe's work (e.g. "The compilation entailed a great deal of work and required a high degree of skill and ingenuity" - one example of many).
A significant proportion of the judgment is given over to detailing the difficulty of compiling the fixture list (which makes for interesting reading, if you're into that kind of thing). It wasn't as easy as just picking 24 teams from a hat and shuffling them around a bit each week. A questionaire is (was?) sent out to all clubs asking who they want to be paired with, when paired with another club you didn't play home games on the same day (example given was: "when Manchester City is playing at home on a given Saturday, it is essential that Manchester United should be playing away. If both are playing at home the gates will suffer" - presumably this was before most of Old Trafford was from the south ... or Asia ... or both). The point is; in a two team city like Sheffield it was pretty straight forward; team A would pick team B and vice versa. That was simple enough to organise but it could also be the case that team A would pick team B and team B would pick team C, and team C would pick team D, etc. So now you have five or six (or more) teams who's fixtures all depend on each other and you have to do this for each match for both the home and away team for thousands of matches each year. This is just one part of the compiling the list, there are numerous examples given of the questions asked of each club (do you have floodlights? are you willing to play under flood lights? which midweek day do you prefer to play on?, etc). Having worked out all this information he would try and build a TYPEWRITTEN (!!!) fixture list as best he could and then consult with the clubs and the league and inevitably changes would be requested and he'd start all over again!!! This brief summary really doesn't do the guy's work justice (no pun intended). Read the judgment for a fuller picture, the detail of his work goes on for pages. He did quite an amazing job.
This was absolutely central to the case. The judge said "the chronological list is produced as a result of the entire skill, labour, time, judgment and ingenuity of the League, their servants and agents. [...] it is not open to the defendants to try and dissect and break down the efforts of Sutcliffe in the way suggested".
These days you feed 20/24 teams into a computer and it spits out the resulting fixtures. Would the court have had as much respect for the (somewhat) random database driven output by a pile of silicon? Open to debate, but I think not.
Might be a bluff, losing a case would cost them hundreds or thousands of "important revenue stream"s where as winning it would be nothing more than a moral victory (its not like thousands of fan sites will suddenly start paying them - they'd just remove the listings, which benefits no-one). Not that I'm recommending you test them
shorehamview
Pink Sambuca drinking World Champion.
They can shove their "important revenue stream" up their arses. What next? Are they going to sue a kid who draws the United badge on his school book? The sooner money-grubbing bastards like Datacock are hounded out of existence then the sooner football will return to the fans. They'll be after the guys who make fans badges next.
Datacock Man - "Did you realise that as the Sheffield United badge is round then we, Datacock, own round? The shape round? A circle? The very shape is copyright protected, and we are in the process of litigation against man-hole cover makers, road signs and all circular things the world over?"
Me - "Shove it up your round hole, fanny boy." (Ever the one for the more mature end of the discussion.)
Datacock Man - "Did you realise that as the Sheffield United badge is round then we, Datacock, own round? The shape round? A circle? The very shape is copyright protected, and we are in the process of litigation against man-hole cover makers, road signs and all circular things the world over?"
Me - "Shove it up your round hole, fanny boy." (Ever the one for the more mature end of the discussion.)
Sensiblade
Well-Known Member
They may sue if you have a Blades Tattoo!!!
They could sue the Tattooist too for a double there money bonus!!!
They could sue the Tattooist too for a double there money bonus!!!
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