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Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

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Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#21

Post by mattmaroon »

mattmaroon wrote: post #19

As for the stats, you purchase them from a stats provider. The big dog is Stats.com, but they're very expensive. They are the primary source for all of the major fantasy sites, though some use secondary sources (I think for accuracy verification). At Draftmix we used a competitor of theirs called PA Sports Ticker, which Stats bought shortly after we shut Draftmix down. We had previously used a cheaper one called XML…

I should also mention that while scraping is an option, though possibly not a legal one, some of the stats sites (I've heard) routinely put some false data in their to catch scrapers. You could probably get around this by scraping multiple sites and throwing out any data that isn't identical.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#22

Post by smackfu »

cloudkj wrote: post #17

Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs. I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data f…

The business opportunity is probably just getting big enough to get a buyout offer from one of the bigger dogs.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#23

Post by davidedicillo »

mccutchen wrote: post #4

I too have wondered about this for a couple of minor side projects. I've always resorted to scraping, but it feels wrong and I know it's not feasible for commercial projects. I've always assumed that there was some commercial data source out there that would provide all of this information in a nice, structured format for some kind of fee, but I have yet to find it. One nice thing about major sites moving to "live" s…

that's what I was using for Twootball, the problem is that it breaks during the playoff.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#24

Post by kreek »

cloudkj wrote: post #17

Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs. I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data f…

I don't know about other sports but I have researched this for the Premier League (soccer) and they own the stats lock stock and barrel. Even if you hired a bunch of mechanical turks to watch every game and jot down every shot and tackle the stats still belong to the Premier Leageue because the games are arranged by them. If you list the Premier League schedule on your blog you'll get a cease and desist unless you pay them a fee.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#25

Post by LargeWu »

kreek wrote: post #24
cloudkj wrote: post #17

Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs. I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data f…

I don't know about other sports but I have researched this for the Premier League (soccer) and they own the stats lock stock and barrel. Even if you hired a bunch of mechanical turks to watch every game and jot down every shot and tackle the stats still belong to the Premier Leageue because the games are arranged by them. If you list the Premier League schedule on your blog you'll get a cease and desist unless you pa…

American courts have ruled that sports statistics are "pure facts", and therefore not copyrightable. In fact, companies like STATS, Inc. rely on the fact that they are public domain. When you pay STATS, what you are buying is the compilation and quality control they provide.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#26

Post by niravshah »

weixiyen wrote: post #11
iheartmemcache wrote: post #2

This[1] StackOverflow thread answers this question pretty thoroughly. Unfortunately it looks like if you want it to be legal, you should be prepared to pay a hefty (> 4 figures) monthly subscription fee. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/57106/anyone-know-of-an-n...

It's a lot more than 4 figures. Getting just the basic data will be in the 5s, and that's per season of 1 sport. Maybe I suck at research but after talking to the reps about pricing, 4 figures would be an absolute steal.

4 figures a month, 5 figures a year/season :)

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#27

Post by luffy »

Regarding scraping:

I have a hard time figuring out what the difference is between having a human read a web page with sports scores on it, and then entering those scores in to your application vs. having a scraper grab those scores automatically. In most cases, these source web pages will be publicly available without requiring any agreement to a terms of service contract.

Scraping a site and using the actual HTML in your application would be a copyright violation, definitely. Sometimes a particular format can even be patented. So I'd definitely stay away from actually scraping out an entire table and inserting that into your app.

But as far as the scores/facts - those are not subject to copyright. So what is the particular legal issue if you are scraping and only getting non-copyrightable facts from a publicly available web page? I'm genuinely curious to know.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#28

Post by weixiyen »

niravshah wrote: post #26
weixiyen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot more than 4 figures. Getting just the basic data will be in the 5s, and that's per season of 1 sport. Maybe I suck at research but after talking to the reps about pricing, 4 figures would be an absolute steal.

4 figures a month, 5 figures a year/season :)

Ah it appears I just suck at reading. Thanks :)

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#29

Post by gcaprio »

I'm actually glad someone brought this up. I'm starting a company around this very idea: making data available and consumable. Our first site is up:

http://www.cfbreference.com

There's about 5 years of data that we've culled from the NCAA about CFB. We're adding more every week and will soon go back in time for historical data.

But, our twist is that the site will be upgraded to be a completely consumable site. Full REST API support, dynamic url data generation and more. We're adding new stuff every day. So you can get the data you way in JSON, RDF, XML & HTML depending on your Accept header, querying string parameter and even url parameters.

We are going to try and build apps on top of this date, but data sites are and will remain FREE. We want to encourage community participation contributions. That means free for anyone, anywhere even if you yourself don't contribute data.

We're also going to add scoring / charting apps for mobile phones so that you can chart your own games and, if you'd like, contribute the data back to use.

We're not 100% there yet, but I'll post here when we are. We'd love feedback from the entire HN community, not only on the sports data aspect but on the technical implementation. After all, if it's not easy to use & powerful, we're not doing a good enough job.

Re: Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

#30

Post by notahacker »

LargeWu wrote: post #25
kreek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about other sports but I have researched this for the Premier League (soccer) and they own the stats lock stock and barrel. Even if you hired a bunch of mechanical turks to watch every game and jot down every shot and tackle the stats still belong to the Premier Leageue because the games are arranged by them. If you list the Premier League schedule on your blog you'll get a cease and desist unless you pa…

American courts have ruled that sports statistics are "pure facts", and therefore not copyrightable. In fact, companies like STATS, Inc. rely on the fact that they are public domain. When you pay STATS, what you are buying is the compilation and quality control they provide.

UK courts have ruled otherwise, and the FA has a copyright troll that specialises in sending c&d letters to webmasters displaying fixture lists and their webhosts.
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