2020 NFHS Baseball Rules PDF

[Texas Aggie]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

No. The words of the rules themselves are not their property. I had this confirmed by an intellectual property lawyer and looked up the case law. But all you have to do is a text comparison with OBR, and you'll see there's nowhere near enough original material to get copyright protection.

The photos, the ads, the commentary at the beginning and end of the book -- those are Fed's property. But the rules themselves? They'd get laughed out of court.

As an IP lawyer myself, I can tell you that "original material," as you suggest, is not the standard. In fact, the USSC has ruled that the level of creativity does not necessarily have to be that high. Perhaps whoever wrote the original OBR code might have had a copyright infringement case against the first Fed code but that's their problem, and that horse is long out of the barn. It isn't relevant to this issue.

Plus, the issue here isn't whether there is a text file somewhere of ONLY the Fed rules starting with Rule 1 and ending with the last paragraph of the final rule. The issue is that there is what appears to be a downloadable PDF file of the actual rule book with everything that goes with it. The argument you make with respect to the OBR is only relevant to the hypothetical text file. The PDF file, which includes the other stuff Fed put in, IS under their copyright and is enforceable (to the extent they want it to be). You take the work as a whole. Just because there is something in the book that MAY not subject to the author's copyright doesn't mean the entire publication isn't. If that were true, every history textbook that ever existed that contained the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address (or a thousand other things) wouldn't be subject to the author's copyright. The fact that there MAY be a greater percentage of material in the Fed baseball rules that are similar in nature to OBR than a history textbook doesn't change this. I could compile a handbook with the Dec. of Ind., the Constitution of the US, and several other freely available founding docs and copyright that. I would definitely add commentary, but if I did and offered it for sale, you better not copy it and share it, regardless of how much public domain material we both agree is in there.

I think either you misunderstood your lawyer friend or he misunderstood your description of what the rule book was.