PDF's aren't as hackable as Flash and are much less likely to run executable code.

Why else?

If it's a copy of Fed's football rules, then yes, it's legal.

Fed claims a copyright on their rule book, but that claim would never stand up in court considering that the great majority of the material in it was taken from public domain sources and is present in other governing bodies' football rule books. At best they might sustain a copyright on some short passages of Fed's original material, but there doesn't seem to be enough of that in the book to interest anybody.

I laugh at the way, for instance, the USFL copied NFL's contemporaneous rule book, altered just a few words in the whole thing, and slapped a copyright notice on it! A copyright notice doesn't make a piece of writing your property; it has to itself be original.

Fed didn't always even have a copyright notice on their rule book. I have a 1960 football rule book (NFSHSAA-NAIA-NJCAA Alliance) and it has no copyright notice. All the current USAn rule books originated from the product of a single rules committee, which used to be published by Spalding, which came under the control of the NCAA. NFL and Fed started with NCAA's, and started amending it separately. At some point somebody decided to slap a copyright notice on the front, but it's far too late for that to be effective. You think that by altering a few words at a time over many annual editions, you get to claim copyright over the whole thing? Don't make me laugh.

Copyright is meant to protect literary expression, not the conveyance of facts. Since rule books are useful articles and football is not a proprietary game, the language of the rules falls under a doctrine in copyright law that states, essentially, that if there's only one or a few ways to conveniently express certain information, you can't copyright the language used.

There's also the fact that Flash drains the battery on mobile devices and is a memory hog. Still, I wish I had the option to choose whether to view Flash content on my iDevices.

Exactly the reason I've tried to get a pdf copy, it's nice to be able to look things up easily. God forbid we have a question at halftime that we have ten minutes to look up, I can go to my phone and search a pdf easily but may not have internet (or a phone that can access the arbiter site).

BTW, the arbiter technical representative I talked with last week suggested I scan a copy of the book and put it into PDF when I pointed out that things are missing in the online version of the book (ie 8-man modifications for football). That's a nice cheap scanning method (1dollarscan.com), I might have to give it a try. Have you used them before

-Josh

You may think so, but I bet the Fed makes them take it down.

The problem is that usually those scans produce images rather than text PDF's: the image files are not searchable.

They have an OCR option that makes their PDF scans searchable and selectable. I haven't used them personally, but those I know who have speak highly of them.

How, do they send their goons? Heck, I've got a PDF of it; anybody here want me to host it at my Web site? If they ask BestWeb to take it down, I'll show BestWeb a copy of NCAA's rules and let them laugh along with me at Fed's copyright claim.

I'll bet you that BestWeb would pull the content faster than you can shake a stick. They are not going to risk their safe harbor under the DCMA based on your half baked legal theories.

ITS, HLinNC and I joined the NFHS Officials Association and have access to the pdf files. I have them saved on my computer for football, basketball and baseball and includes, RB, CB, OM and HB. I have no idea why you don't.

They will call the Nevada HS association and the state association will call the local association.

LOL!

Already did... that's my association until I move again.

They posted these as a resource for the officials, along with several other internal documents that we use frequently, which you can see at Rules & Resources

This is my first year doing football in Las Vegas, so I can't speak as to why or how the decision was made to do it this way. I just hope that NFHS sees the value of having these resources available and accepts that nobody is served by blocking making the games' rules more obscured. This is a case where it serves the interest of transparency of administration.
If their business model suffers from lack of rules book sales for things like this, then they're doing it wrong.
At the end of the day, however, some authorization should be received, if it's possible to get NFHS to respond/agree to it.

DMCA take-down notice. Pretty effective since it establishes a penalty per unauthorized distribution (counted as each time a file is transmitted from the server) and allows a 6-figure penalty per violation. It was intended to stop Napster-style copyright violations, but like many things congress has attempted, did little to curb online copyright infringement and made many other unrelated activities criminal.

But pretty ineffective against material that's already in the public domain.

From page 1 of the *.pdf file in question:

I think that's pretty clear. It's possible they got permission, and no one outside of that particular discussion would need to know.
Otherwise, it's still a copyrighted work. If the NFHS sends a DMCA takedown notice to the web-hosting company or ISP, and that company doesn't at least pass the word on, then there is serious litigation possibility at stake. At the end of the day, it's best to not screw with it unless you've got the documentation that proves you were given permission.
There is certainly a legitimate point that the rules may be public domain, but there's lots in there besides rules.

Tony, I wonder if officials in NC have some sort of special access through your state.