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Comment by CJKinni | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the comments here on copyright seem to be looking for answers to distinguish this from other copyright issues. Rather than summing up every copyright argument for or against, I thought I'd link to a fairly relevant case: Feist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Feist is a case where a phone book company stole the data in a phone book, and began reselling it. It deals with publication of facts, and is a situation where there's a reasonable public policy argument for incentivising the private company's work collection of phone number data. It's a commonly taught fundamental Copyright claim that is a great starting point for those interested in researching further.

View on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v.....

> 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].

I think this is a more correct case to apply.

The Feist case was about the expense accrued in aggregating the information and the incentive issues that arise if those efforts are not protected.

The NBA case was about the division of rights between the competition organizer and those attempting to report on it. Specifically, are the reporters required to delay their reporting efforts when the only information being reported generated by the event is factual.

If I understand correctly, this ruling doesn't preclude the event organizers from banning all electronic communication devices from the premises. It just prevents them from pursuing any civil penalties from those that report on the event.

I wonder what the effect on attendance would be, if major sporting events had a "no cell phones" rule. My guess offhand: it would be devastating to ticket sales.

But then again, of most of the people going are hardcore fans, sales might not be affected to much (although there might be outrage)

PGA Tour banned cell phones until 2011: http://www.golf.com/ap-news/tour-allow-cell-phones-tournamen...

I've been trying to mull that out as well from an economic perspective but I think it's highly dependent on the existing distribution networks which adds additional complexity.

Major League sports information is disseminated fairly quickly and the attendance levels make technological prohibitions a challenge. The nature of world chess championships make it a little different, as long as the globally recognized top ranked players are in attendance (preventing an organizational schism) I think the organizers could do whatever they want.

In the end I think this ruling just means they can't enforce a civil penalty for violation of these rules, but there's no reason they can't expel the violator from their event.

It's an interesting case.

They stole the data!? What did the phone company do when it no longer had the data for their phone books?! ooooh, you mean they made a copy which the court ruled was ok to do.

Your post is good (but your link is broken, please go steal a better copypaste) and informative, but the point I'm making is that it's easier for people learning about this to see the underlying issues that courts grapple with if we stick to less loaded terms.

Your link doesn't work (HN ate the last period up). Here's a working link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...

Thanks -- I edited my link to Feist from an hour ago to have the extra period, too.

At least in UK, I think that example is better classed as 'database right'

The UK is unusual in having database rights, most countries don't respect them to that extent.

All EU countries have it.

In the UK the assembly of facts is copyrighted, in the rest only the structure, design and any comments or similar.

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