Early days in development but this is a taste of how it will look. There's a lot of colour and content to go on there yet. Have a look round and any suggestions would be appreciated.

http://pooliebunker.co.uk/portal/portal.php

i just wish i could keep in this one, i keep losing my password board says things read when they not. im confused

that development site does not need a password.

tell me when i need to change or i may already have, confusion is a terrible thing

You won't need to change anything. That is a development site and when its all done I'll upgrade this site and do away with the test area. You won't need to do anything with your password, you'll just log in as normal.

Same place, same username it will just look like the other one.

Can we still get BBC2??

just hope bbc1 still posts

looking good Mr I

How about under the calender a list of fixtures for that month

aye thats the plan Fens.

It was a regular pain on Pools Online, as they would apparently even threaten you if you had a Prediction League with more than one fixture in advance.

It's one of the stupidest things that a particualrly stupid organisation has done. If I wanted I could have got a license to show the fixtures - but they would have wanted me to fork out something like £300 to do so. Renewable every year of course. Don't know if it's changed, but it actually cost more for a Fan Website to put the fixtures up than it did for a Local Paper at one point. I did toy with the idea of offering to advertise the fixtures for them for the same price as it would cost me to display them but decided that as they're a bunch of humourless bean counters it wouldn't get very far. There is some legal ambiguity about it following a European Court ruling 18 months back, but at the moment no-one is really prepared to fund a long, drawn-out test case and so everyone keeps their heads down.

I believe Pools do get a discretionary license that they can award to a fan site, but only one and it currently goes to Pools Stats.... they however can't stop you listing games that have already happened, or the current table as in theory you can calculate that yourself.

It's a shame no one does have the clout to take this to court. My money would be firmly on the copyright claim being thrown out.
How can you copyright data? It's a collection of facts, not intellectual composition. And unless you preserve the exact format the fixtures were published in, it's not artistic composition either that you're copying.

If you publish a calendar showing a lot of coming events and some of these just happen to be football matches, what right does anyone have to hide that part of the "future" from you?

Three hundred quid indeed!

It's only (I believe) this way in the UK and Ireland - copyright here is based on a "Sweat of the Brow" (or some similar legalese) doctrine whereas Continental jurisdictions focus more upon creative works. In other words, the league compiles the fixtures. For a comparison, the ECJ has accepted that TV and Radio listings are capable of being copyrighted.

Maybe I'm mistaken but I always thought you didn't actively "copyright" a work as if you were filing a patent because copyright is automatically attributed to the author. An example being this very post which is subject to copyright by virtue of having been written and published.

Or do I have to add "(c) richard head, Montpellier, 2006"?

Also I believed (again possibly mistakenly) that you could publish extracts from copyrighted works for the purpose of news reporting, educational purposes, debate, etc., without permission. So even if the copyright does stand you'd be able to reproduce some of it (though how much?) on a Web site.