Quote from Veteran Official that's seen the most A-11 Games in the Nation

[bisonlj]

With the discussion of copyrighting and shareing, I had a question to this body who seems fairly knowledgeable about this stuff. I offered to send a copy of the Part II quiz on a local HS site to allow people to see how well they would do. I was told by another official that I was not allowed to do that because the material had copyright protection. He said they had been warned previously by the NFHS for doing this.

Is this a similar issue in that technically I shouldn't forward it but if challenged in court I would probably win. I want to honor the spirit of the copyright so I'm not going to do it. I was just wondering if this was a similar issue.

I'll hang up now and listen to your answer.

[asdf]

AFM just happens to be selling a certain product on DVD.

I am shocked that no dissenting view is presented....

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by bisonlj

With the discussion of copyrighting and shareing, I had a question to this body who seems fairly knowledgeable about this stuff. I offered to send a copy of the Part II quiz on a local HS site to allow people to see how well they would do. I was told by another official that I was not allowed to do that because the material had copyright protection. He said they had been warned previously by the NFHS for doing this.

Is this a similar issue in that technically I shouldn't forward it but if challenged in court I would probably win. I want to honor the spirit of the copyright so I'm not going to do it. I was just wondering if this was a similar issue.

For a test like that, the question copyright law asks is whether there would be a great number of ways to express the same content. If the test is just short answer stuff about Fed officiating, then the answer is probably "no" -- that there are only a few ways to put questions testing one's knowledge of that subject. In that case, a copyright would tend to convert knowledge of the subject into a secret -- which it is not -- and thereby provide an illegitimate means of monopolizing knowledge about the subject.

It's like recipes. A cookbook can have all kinds of chitchat between the recipes that would be copyrightable, but not the recipes themselves because practically speaking there are few useful ways to express such useful knowledge.

However, I know people who like you feel that when an author has done a lot of work compiling recipes (in these people's case, recipes for fireworks), that even if they're not secrets, they won't communicate them to others because they want the author to benefit from the sale of the books. If you feel the same way about Fed and their revenue, fine.

Still, the particular compilation of test questions is copyrightable, the way a long passage of a cookbook covering several recipes would be protectable by copyright, even without a lot of chitchat in between. I suppose someone might make the same argument about the order of chapters or sections in a rulebook, but it would apply only if the rules would read as easily regardless of the order they were presented in.

Robert