Why different rulesets?

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by chapmaja

$$$$$$$. Remember, each organization that has rules needs to publish a rule book. This means all coaches, officials and possibly others need to purchase a rule book. By having a different rule book these organizations sell rule books, either as an individual cost, or as part of a registration fee of some sort. The publishing agency may not make a lot of money off the rule books, or they may a lot of money off the rule books.

Thinking simply about the Michigan High School Athletic Association since this is where I work.

Let's say we have 1000 officials statewide in a sport. We get new rule books every two seasons from the MHSAA. If the MHSAA gets the books for $3 from the NFHS and our registration fee is $12 per sport, then the MHSAA is making $6 off the books in one year (assuming casebook and rulesbook like softball has) and $12 in another year since they don't provide us with the books. The same rule book that the NFHS has sold the MHSAA may cost $2 to actually print, thus the NFHS makes $1 per book sold to the state association.

If there wasn't a financial component to this, you wouldn't see this many different rule codes.

No, that's ridiculous, because to the beneficiaries of a sport itself, that's a cost, not a benefit. Softball is not a proprietary game like Monopoly. At best a body can make money off a participant sport by selling or renting equipment or facilities, like their gym, the way Ping Pong is a proprietary set of equipment for playing table tennis, or sell club membership.

The amount of copyrightable material in a rule book for something like softball is negligible as concerns the rules content itself (i.e. not yearbook details). Copyright protects only literary expression, not ideas. I suppose the amendments to a year's softball rules could be treated as a trade secret, but that's laughable.

It is no different than the hijack to the thread about car parts. Each manufacturer has slightly different parts because they make the parts (or a related supplier does) and as such, they need to make money off the parts. If all cars used the same basic battery then the companies would make 1 basic battery and very few organizations would make batteries because the scale of production would be more important than the specification of production.

Which is why today we're all using Apple microcomputers, right?