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Historically, Football DataCo claimed rights to football fixtures in the UK, on grounds of copyright and sui generis database rights, and extracted licensing fe
by UVB-76 12y ago
Historically, Football DataCo claimed rights to football fixtures in the UK, on grounds of copyright and sui generis database rights, and extracted licensing fees from those wishing to publish them.
That practice ended with the March 2012 ruling in the European Court of Justice [1] that neither rights subsist in relation to fixture lists.
However, in a separate ruling [2] Football DataCo successfully argued they did have a database right over live data concerning matches (e.g. goals, goalscores, cards, etc.)
[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=119904&doclang=en http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=119...
[2] http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2012/1185.html http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2012/1185.html
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoI was on the receiving end of a DataCo C&D and had to stop my quite-popular, burgeoning 'prediction game' site - was a huge shame. When you say "goals" in relation to [2], does that mean results cannot be published, or does that only relate to specific times of goals?
- Firepyre 12y agoGreat question. I've long had an idea for a fantasy football type game and shied away from using premiership football results because of this ruling. However thanks to the links UVB-76 provided I've now spent a bit of time going through the details and I'm confident that simple goal and timing data do not fall under this simply because it does not meet the 'substantial' requirement, as made clear in paragraph 76 . It seems uk.practicallaw.com has a great comment on the finding, also supporting this argument.