The season kicks off with a feisty Lancashire derby and finishes with a feisty Lancashire derby. That’s all we can tell you.
The great fixture rip off continues!
If we wanted to publish fixtures on Vital Network Ltd it would cost us nearly £20 000 (with no commercial gain) or £200 ish per individual site + VAT.
These are OUR fixtures! The games that we readily advertise for our clubs who make much needed revenue from us giving free ticket information with no advertising costs.
And yet Dataco are still fighting the courts who have twice now ruled this charge not to be right.
See: www.bbc.co.uk
European Judges said: ‘A football fixture list cannot be protected by copyright when its compilation is dictated by rules or constraints which leave no room for creative freedom.”
The case was referred from the High Court in London to the European Court to “assess, in the light of the considerations set out by the [Luxembourg] court, whether the football fixture lists concerned are databases which satisfy the conditions of eligibility for copyright protection’.
The European judges added: ‘However, the court adds that unless the procedures for creating the lists concerned as described by the national court are supplemented by elements reflecting originality in the selection or arrangement of the data contained in those lists, they do not suffice for those lists to be protected by the copyright laid down in the directive.’
However, the Premier League said there were elements of the case which indicated that football fixture lists were ‘capable of database copyright protection’.
So the fight goes on.
So, for fixtures, go to the official site here
We do have just about enough leeway to mention the opening fixture, away at Burnley. If the manager was hoping for an easing into the new season, he got just about the absolute opposite with a the swiftest of possible returns to his old stamping ground. I’m sure that he will say that it is just any other game and that he has a lot of time for the people of Burnley, but you can be sure that our ten fingered friends from the north (recently seen on the small screen at the very end of Game of Thrones) will not be taking it so lightly. You can almost hear the cackles from here.
To be fair, it’s not a bad opening line up. We play them then there, then them there then, followed by that other team at that place there. We finish the season at home to Blackpool, by which time OC will be lauded as a master tactician for taking us down only to revitalise us, or his name will only ever be muttered in dark corners of the Lofthouse Lower on rainy days in February when the crowd is down to less than six thousand and Crawley have come calling.
Obviously, it won’t come to that.