Baseball Projections and Plagiarism

[James282]

Just curious if BP or any other site that uses projection models like PECOTA are copyright protected. It seems like it would be a difficult thing to do, because you could simply change the numbers by an extremely small amount and not say what model you use, but it seems like anybody could just make a website, not say how they arrived at the conclusions, and plagiarise whatever system they like. Only reason I'm thinking of this is because I was reading the Padres official website and a fan wrote in asking about Kevin Kouzmanoff, and the writer responded with basically his exact PECOTA projection without referencing it at all. "Yeah, Kouzmanoff looks like a .285 hitter, with 20 homers and 80ish RBI." I mean it's obviously more compelling when you understand how the model works, but this seems to be a pretty direct ripoff.

james

[kyleb]

PECOTA is definitely copyright-protected, but I don't think this is a huge infringment. The BP team doesn't exactly have a legion of lawyers at their disposal to sick upon the writers who plagiarize.

[J.R.]

The click wrap agreement provides:

[ QUOTE ]
Fair Use is Permitted

Fair use of copyrighted material includes the use of protected materials for noncommercial purposes such as research, peer review, commentary and news reporting. Unless otherwise noted, persons and subscribers who wish to download or print PEV's text and image files for such uses may do so without PEV's express permission. Users must cite the author and source of this material as they would material from any printed work. By downloading, printing, or otherwise using such text and image files, users agree that they will limit their use of such information to fair use, and will not violate PEV's or any other party's proprietary rights.

[/ QUOTE ]

PEV = Prospectus Entertainment Ventures, LLC, the entity that owns BP

TOS link

I dunno if the news reporting fair use exception applies, but the reporter should cite to BP at a minimum. (I'm not an IP lawyer tho).

A larger scale reproduction of the projections is a no-no. Technically its iffy, as data is not copyrighted, but rather the systems that produce the data are legally protected (i.e. the "PECOTA algorithm"). It would be *rather hard* to demonstrate that you produced the same data w/out stealing.

Not giving props to BP = mad douchebaggery