[javajosh]

I think another argument is that the game is enjoyed in many forms, over radio, over television, streamed over the internet - and all of those rights must be purchased, etc. If the game statistics are another form of enjoyment, then it is another form, and should be subject to the same ownership issues as the other channels.

OTOH, I think the argument is very weak. First, precedent is strongly against the players here. Player stats have never been licensed to my knowledge. It's not clear if this is for lack of trying, or if the market for that data used to be superfans, and it was too small to matter.

That said, in any argument I tend to side with the underdog. I think it would be great if Athletic voluntarily shared some of their revenue with players! It would be a good move for them, because it would take wind out of the sails of the counter-parties, and it wouldn't acknowledge the players right to their data, except tacitly.

[matsemann]

> and all of those rights must be purchased

this have been tried for Chess, and deemed not applicable. Others are allowed to do live coverage of the moves without purchasing any rights. The organizers control the live footage, can ban them from entering the premises to interview players etc., so most will adhere to some form of contract. But if you have no ties there's nothing stopping you from making your own content based on purely the moves being made.

Update: Specifically, the moves are not copyrightable https://chess24.com/en/read/news/us-judge-agrees-with-chess2...

It also mentions "NBA vs. Motorola" in which NBA didn't own statistics of NBA games and others were allowed to use them.

[ukoki]

Interesting. Makes me wonder if you could train a machine learning model to take one or more football match video streams as input and turn them into a live 3d model. You then argue that the model simply documents the facts of the game, so does not infringe on the copyright of the original source streams. Then you sell live footage of the model (perhaps with slightly different camera angles)

[Animats]

Makes me wonder if you could train a machine learning model to take one or more football match video streams as input and turn them into a live 3d model.

It's been done.[1] Not for American football, for soccer.

[1] https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/soccer/soccer_on_yo...

[zimpenfish]

> does not infringe on the copyright of the original source streams

Unless you're getting the raw video stream from all the cameras, it'll be transformed through the producer and director's creative control and that, I suspect, would block you from doing this - it's not longer just "facts", it's a particular interpretation of those "facts" (cf bare recounting of historical events vs someone's book covering the same, I suppose.

[rusk]

> it'll be transformed through the producer and director's creative control and that, I suspect, would block y

I don’t know about that. You’re using the directors production to establish the fact but once you have extruded those facts, it could be argued in principal of not legally that this is a new creative work based off the mere facts.

[zimpenfish]

The "mere facts" would be a wide-angled camera showing the entire pitch and very few people would watch that, I think. Using your judgement as a director/producer to use different angles, cameras, positions, etc. to provide a more interesting spectacle would, for me (IANAL), be transformative enough.

Consider an analogy to classical music - Beethoven's 5th isn't copyrighted but a particular expression of it by an orchestra can be.

[rusk]

It would be a case to be heard in court no doubt. It could be argued that the footage is but one corroborating account of events in the dream theatre. All it would take would be to independently capture some off camera activity. Director has to assert that somehow your work is derivative. I’m not a lawyer of course and if you are I defer to your expertise. It’s an interesting thought experiment none the less.

[defertoreptar]

Where they could get you is how they can protect their "likeness." If you reduced the simulation to only functional aspects of the game, then I don't see how it'd be a problem.

[pmoriarty]

"in any argument I tend to side with the underdog. I think it would be great if Athletic voluntarily shared some of their revenue with players!"

The underdogs here are the consumers, who ultimately wind up paying all those hundreds of millions.

[mschuster91]

> Player stats have never been licensed to my knowledge.

Of course they are, that's the entire business model of data analytics companies - the customers are:

- clubs and national teams themselves (e.g. German national team coaches Klinsmann and Löw were famous for early adopting data-driven training)

- sports betting services, casinos and similar enterprises

- TV and radio stations so that the commenters can (at an instant) pull facts like "player xyz has a 80% successful pass rate over the last 30 games"

This stuff is called "soccer analytics", the (German) Wikipedia has a decent article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soccer_Analytics

[HelloMcFly]

In those instances, nobody is licensing the statistics themselves, they are licensing access to the statistics databases that those organizations have compile and maintain. At least that's my understanding.