Are running event results Copyrighted? Are they really the property of event organizers?

Read that and went to the results for that marathon. Right at the top it says you need can not duplicate results without permission, subject to 150,000 fine and attorney fees.

I can see both sides. The results companies produce the results with a lot of work and the consolidator sites just harvest them with a script. The consolidator sites are getting all the traffic now and profit with ads.

However, on the other hand, some of the marathons don't have any old results available.

If events reserve the hosting of results, shouldn't they have a duty to keep those results up for a longer time. Many just store back results for 20 years. Many events go out of business and the results are lost forever.

Finding old 1990 times even for marathons takes a lot of effort.

The above is just opinion. I'm not a lawyer.

not a lawyer wrote:

Read that and went to the results for that marathon. Right at the top it says you need can not duplicate results without permission, subject to 150,000 fine and attorney fees. .

They can write whatever they want on the top of the results. It's a toothless bluff.

Results are not copyrightable. Only an original and unique formatting is. Just copy the results to a spreadsheet, then format them in your own unique presentation style.

Call the Race Director up and ask him to serve legal papers on the steps of the nearest law school, after you can coordinate the local media to show up.

Not sure what your m.o. is for bringing up a 2+ year old tweet exchange, but...

Sites like marathonguide are stealing intellectual property when they repost entire results without the permission of the timing companies or the races. They are no better than sites that scrape articles or blog posts and repost them on their site.

The bad thing is that often these results are inaccurate. It appears that mguide just scrapes a result site once and doesn't update the information when there are changes to the results. Plus, they don't even have the courtesy of at least liking back to the site with the original results.

Theft is theft.

Yes, individual sports statistics are facts and as the Supreme Court has indicated, "No one may claim originality as to facts." (The Copyright Office seconds that emotion.) In a 1997 case, the NBA went after a paging service that borrowed a live feed from a basketball game. A court of appeals ruled that sports stats couldn't be protected -- for example, no one can claim rights to the name of the teams playing, changes in score, team in possession of the ball, whether the team was in free-throw bonus, the quarter of the game, and the remaining time in the quarter. Despite that ruling, other leagues such as the NFL, PGA, and MLB have unsuccessfully gone after fantasy sports leagues or other users who have ported their stats.

http://dearrichblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/can-we-republish-sports-statistics.html

NBA games not “original works o authorship.

http://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1467&context=lclr

Copyright summary

http://imslp.org/wiki/United_States_Copyright_Law

17 usc 506c:

Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.

of course, the intent and knowledge requirements are difficult to establish, and the fine is ridiculously low as compared with the fines for copyright violations...but its probably worth sending some letters to these RDs nonetheless. give me just 2500 for every time ive seen someone misuse a claim of copyright, and id be a rich man

M.O.? Why? but... A friend ran a marathon last year and I looked up their time on athlinks. It wasn't there. I wondered why. So I googled it. Google sometimes brings up old threads.

Intellectual curiosity made me wonder about the whole issue.

Malmo is right, you can't copyright facts (Supreme Court has reiterated this many times). Now, you can't copy and resell a phone directory verbatim because there was "originality" in the way those facts were compiled. And if the race director did some really fancy analysis or organization of the results, you may not be able to copy those even though they are also "facts" in the strict sense. You can look at Feist v. Rural Telephone for an exposition of the law, but the race results are not protected intellectual property and MAY be reposted despite what some hack race director says.

Where do things fall with respect to compiling all-time running performance lists and then having them lifted and reposted without crediting the person that did all of the research, etc.?

results consolidator sites wrote:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/Athlinks/posts/10152952607230341

Please read comment by Chris H about response from a RD.

What can be original content is your public shaming of this nitwit race director , by name, on the most popular running website in the world! The rest of us will join in support of you with our own original content as well. :-)

Wondering About This wrote:

Where do things fall with respect to compiling all-time running performance lists and then having them lifted and reposted without crediting the person that did all of the research, etc.?

I'm not an expert in this, but a compilation of all-time running lists probably wouldn't meet the threshold of originality required for copyright protection. There is no "sweat of the brow" doctrine where you get protection just by expending a lot of effort on research/compilation. Obviously there is a whole gray area and that's why there's so much litigation over intellectual property rights, but you need at least some minimal degree of creativity.

malmo wrote:

results consolidator sites wrote:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/Athlinks/posts/10152952607230341

Please read comment by Chris H about response from a RD.

What can be original content is your public shaming of this nitwit race director , by name, on the most popular running website in the world! The rest of us will join in support of you with our own original content as well. :-)

If it's the same RD, the running community has spoken and spoken loudly.

Sounds like blowhard hogwash.

You probably can't Copyright base ball scores. You probably can't Copyright marathon results. Malmo brought a good argument.

The running community will rise, crowd source, and defend any lawsuit against marathonguide or athlinks.