I am a bit of an aspiring data scientist and have,over the last couple years, compiled a ton of sports related statistics into a personal database. I have, to this point only referenced the database for personal use. However, it has recently occurred to me that I could leverage the database to create a product that I could then sell for profit. My question relates to the legality of using the statistics I have collected in a commercial sense.
From my (very limited) legal understanding, statistics, like scores, rushing yards, turnovers, etc, etc are considered to be "facts" and therefore not subject to copyright. Yet, many websites prohibit the use of data collected on their website for commercial purposes. I assume, since it is explicitly stated, there is a valid legal reason. I was just curious if anyone understood/could explain what the deal is.
Additionally, I am curious how one would legally go about creating a database that could be used for commercial purposes. Presumably you could watch every single game and calculate each statistic by hand and that would be legal, but physically impossible. You could collect every newspaper from around the country and hand pick out statistics from a box score, also pretty much impossible. Really the only other way would be to look up the statistics of interest online. So how could you do it? There are services that sell sports data, but even they presumably didnt watch literally every game to compile their databases, how did they do it? On an even more fundamental level, it seems hard to believe that there is not a straight forward process for being able to legally collect publicly available "facts".
Again, I have no real legal background and am mainly just curious on what the deal is
From my (very limited) legal understanding, statistics, like scores, rushing yards, turnovers, etc, etc are considered to be "facts" and therefore not subject to copyright. Yet, many websites prohibit the use of data collected on their website for commercial purposes. I assume, since it is explicitly stated, there is a valid legal reason. I was just curious if anyone understood/could explain what the deal is.
Additionally, I am curious how one would legally go about creating a database that could be used for commercial purposes. Presumably you could watch every single game and calculate each statistic by hand and that would be legal, but physically impossible. You could collect every newspaper from around the country and hand pick out statistics from a box score, also pretty much impossible. Really the only other way would be to look up the statistics of interest online. So how could you do it? There are services that sell sports data, but even they presumably didnt watch literally every game to compile their databases, how did they do it? On an even more fundamental level, it seems hard to believe that there is not a straight forward process for being able to legally collect publicly available "facts".
Again, I have no real legal background and am mainly just curious on what the deal is