Most of my team data comes from open online sources such as espn.com, nfl.com, myway.com, and yahoo.com. It's easy for anyone to grab whatever they're interested in from those sites.
My play-by-play data comes from a source that's not publicly available, and at this time I regret that I cannot share it. However, I am working hard to develop a way to spread the wealth. One of my biggest goals is to help create a larger, more open, and more collaborative community for football research.
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There's no real terms of service so I'm curious as to the constraints in using this for commercial purposes. I most definitely want to use this for teaching purposes (how to text-mine, how to build a web app from data, etc) but want to know what terms the data can be redistributed.
IANAL, but it has been ruled that NFL player names and statistics are protected by the First Amendment, i.e. no one "owns" it and anyone is free to use it for any purpose.
However, you do have to get the data, and unauthorized access of computers (which constitutes trespassing) can be a legal gray area. I'd love to hear a lawyer weigh in on the legality of scraping the data directly from espn.com.
Last time I checked, the play by play data on espn.com was pretty error-ridden. This was three or so years ago, so it might have changed, and I was hypothetically interested in the score columns, so it may not matter depending on other hypothetical uses. But I'd hypothetically avoid scraping ESPN for that reason alone.
http://www.advancednflstats.com/2007/02/contact.html
Of particular interest:
Where did you get your data?
Most of my team data comes from open online sources such as espn.com, nfl.com, myway.com, and yahoo.com. It's easy for anyone to grab whatever they're interested in from those sites.
My play-by-play data comes from a source that's not publicly available, and at this time I regret that I cannot share it. However, I am working hard to develop a way to spread the wealth. One of my biggest goals is to help create a larger, more open, and more collaborative community for football research.
----
There's no real terms of service so I'm curious as to the constraints in using this for commercial purposes. I most definitely want to use this for teaching purposes (how to text-mine, how to build a web app from data, etc) but want to know what terms the data can be redistributed.