Rules online

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by bigjohn

Is this legal?
Rules & Resources

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.