Football match fixture list copyright claim rejected
Football authorities in England and Scotland have had a court claim over football fixtures’ copyright rejected.
European judges said compiling match fixture lists needed “significant” work, but did not entail the creativity required for copyright protection.
Yahoo, bookmaker Stan James and sports information firm Enetpulse had been accused of breaching EU copyright laws.
“A football fixture list cannot be protected by copyright when its compilation is dictated by rules or constraints which leave no room for creative freedom,” said the European judges.
“Since a 1959 UK decision that such lists were protected, the UK professional football leagues, most recently acting through Football Dataco, have obtained many millions of pounds from betting operators and newspapers for the use of the lists,” he said.
Needless to say, those claiming copyright are not taking this lying down, and are trying to get the UK courts to overrule.
The decision is an important one, in that it reaffirms the principle that creative work is protected, not just any type of work.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
I would go further and say that NO copyright should be vested except in individuals, and in the individual or individuals who is/are responsible for the creation of any work; that they should not be allowed to sell it or alienate it in any way except to their heirs; and that no corporation should be allowed to possess one. The scandalous recent view of Marvel Entertainment trying to screw $17,000 out of the elderly, broken-down creator of the character Ghost Rider, from which they have been making tens of millions in movie receipts, because he had been making a pittance out of signed sketches of his character at comics conventions, is enough to convince anyone with anything like a conscience that the very notion of copyright has been entirely perverted by that generation of vipers known on Earth as corporate lawyers. Copyright was invented so that the creators of successful ideas and works could enjoy the fruits of their labours, not so that they could lose them to faceless corporate monsters.
I had not heard of that story, but it is sickening, and gives the lie to the idea of the “creative industries”.
How do we change things, tho?