
Rugby Union legal battle brewing as players set to fight for right to 'data' - rusk
https://www.rugbypass.com/news/rugby-union-legal-battle-brewing-players-set-fight-right-data
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rusk
It'll be interesting to see where this one goes.

To my non-lawyer sensibilities it seems that while they might have claims on
data protection and FOI terms, I don't think they can claim copyright, or
ownership based on the claim that they "create" the data.

And one other thing:

 _" If a club believes a player to be prone to say concussion, they may well
not wish to sign him."_

This sounds fair enough to me!

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jackvalentine
> This sounds fair enough to me!

Furthermore it would be negligent in my mind to put them in a job where they
might suffer more concussions.

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kodablah
The medical history thing I can understand. However, for the GPS-unit-
collected data, I wonder if a player should just refuse consent. Or if a
league can require consent to play if they are sharing that data to users.
Hypothetically (though it may exist like it does for many other sports), say
I'm watching a diagram based representation of a Rugby match as a normal
consumer. Do these players believe they can refuse to allow the public
use/sharing of movement tracking? How about when they score a try? Who owns
that data? Where does it end? I think the middle ground is all data is made
publicly available (as agreed to by leagues and player unions), or if it is
not considered public data for end consumers then it subject to explicit
approval by the player before being shared.

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notahacker
I'd imagine the ground it'll be settled on is that if you're contracted to
work for someone, the employer owns transferable rights to the work you do,
including derived data analysing your performance. Particularly when the
nature of your work involves thousands of people and television cameras
watching so you can't legitimately claim any privacy rights have been
violated. Some of the data referenced like evidence of concussion problems is
near impossible to suppress given statutory head injury assessments and
minimum rest periods

Frankly, it seems like a waste of time: commercial third party analytics have
been around for years in other sports where they represent much better
performance indicators and lead to much bigger salary differentials, and even
in the unlikely event they win they'll succeed only in having standard
contracts rewritten and players that refuse to share their data being regarded
as a bit suspect.

The UK has ended up with oddities before, like association football scores
technically being the intellectual property of licensing troll FootballDataCo,
which still picks up revenue despite its copyright claims being ruled
unenforceable by European courts. But it's unlikely to end up with oddities
detrimental to the clubs and league.

