Fair or foul?
The Associated Press filed a story out of St. Louis that Major League Baseball is being sued by a fantasy baseball league over whether or not they have the right to use post season team and player statistics. They had been licensing them from MLB, but last year the sport declined to renew the license because it had a better deal elsewhere. Recreating the statistics is easy, but what's at stake is who owns the intellectual property rights to the numbers themselves? There's a lively debate going on in Slashdot about it.
At first glance this seems silly. Of course the stats should be available to anyone who wants them. But I thought about this and wondered why? Most of us rebel against the idea because it conjures up a chilling world where everyone owns meta information. Each of us become a component popped inside some kind of marketing machine--maybe we lose the rights to our own shopping patterns. It could happen.
On the other hand, from MLB's perspective, it's lost revenue. They feel that they should be able to make money out of it for their investors. After all, they certainly trademark rights in the team, the mascot, the players' images, even the words "Major League Baseball". You can't broadcast a game or even a piece of it in any media without their approval, so why not statistics?
In my opinion, there's two reasons why not. The first is that it becomes part of the historical record. As a society, our history belongs to everyone as part of the common experience. The implications of a capitalist history are truly Orwellian.
The second reason is to go back to the reasons that we have intellectual property protection. IP is not supposed to be lottery ticket material, found money falling from the heavens. Rather, it's meant to protect the innovator long enough to recoup a risky investment and make a reasonable profit. It's society's way of giving us ice cream for cleaning up our room. Given this background, I see no work or investment involved in having games that generate statistics. They're part of the historical record and it's just too bad for MLB.
Posted on January 16, 2006
