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Fixed link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v._Motorola,_Inc%2E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v.... > The
by btown 8y ago
Fixed link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Ass%27n_v._Motorola,_Inc%2E 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].
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?
- rayiner 8y ago> 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.
- secabeen 8y ago> 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.
- devilsbabe 8y agoWow really? That's devilishly ingenious. Do you have examples of that?
- ermir 8y agoHere's an example in the cartography world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
- secabeen 8y agoYeah, 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.