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Fixture List Ruling - Football Data Co


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Those lovely folks at the Football Data Co ( not! ) look like they may lose the legal challenge to them being able to charge exhorbitant amounts out of websites that dare list the football fixture lists in advance. Today the European Court of Justice Advocate General refutes their intellectual rights property claim to the fixture lists. Which means all things going well, come next year when a ruling is made, it looks like any site will be able to list the football fixtures.

The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice issued a landmark opinion Thursday regarding the controversial issue of whether the publication of sports fixture lists infringes the copyright of sports bodies & leagues claiming ownership.

In his opinion Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi, refuted the claims of Football DataCo & the English & Scottish football leagues that they have intellectual property rights over annual fixture lists under the Database Directive.

:)

Full story here: http://www.casinos-online.co.uk/news/20111215/publishing-sports-fixture-lists-does-not-infringe-copyright/

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I'd be happy to put some photo's on OTIB of the inside of the ground/s

Albeit not while the game was in play

That's slightly different but equally anal enforcement DataCo like to moan about.. they've even been as petty as to ask people to remove club badges from their forum avatar in the past. :noexp:

The fixtures licence thing is absurd.. I think the complete fixture licence fee is about £5k per season.

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That's per league Tom. To currently list all four divisions in England and all three divisions in Scotland for a website it currently costs in excess of £20k

Plus if you want to purchase photos off an agency such as getty, ap or the press association you have to have a license per season from the Football Data Co. At a cost of £500 per league per season, before you can buy rights to display a photo.

Blame the clubs though as they are all responsible and behind the Football Data co.

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I guess we could always have adopted the old Pro Evo player approach and had an "alternative" fixture list... Such as this Saturday's match versus "Nottm Florist" (3:01 kick off) and the Boxing Day match at "Coventree Town" etc if the ruling goes in favour of the money grabbers....whistle.gif

I think I prefer that! :clapping:

Crawler Tone away in the FU Cup....:laughcont:

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I've always thought fixture lists copyrighting was in a bit of a grey area anyway and all it needed was someone to stand up to them.

A fixture list is exactly that - a list - which by its very nature must be published in the public domain in order for supporters to be able to plan for and buy tickets.

No different at all to a few years back when TV stations tried to prevent other publications from publishing their programme schedule, which also was a nonsense.

Any simple "list", IMO, is in a very grey area when it comes to trying to copyright it. Once a 'list' is made public, it MUST be in the public domain, by definition.

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