Beckett suing COMC over database

Here's a decent summary of the issue:

http://www.cardboardconnection.com/news/law-cards-beckett-comc-break-ends-lawsuit

Here is a copy of the actual lawsuit document:

http://cconnect.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Beckett-Complaint-3-2014.pdf


Beckett must really see COMC as a major threat to its future to make some of the absurd claims (listed as "FACTS") it has presented in this suit. For example:

9. COMC offers a consignment platform to sell sports memorabilia online. A seller sends COMC an item like a baseball card; COMC identifies the card with Beckett data and content media, soans the card, and then adds it to COMC's online inventory. After the card is in the seller's inventory, the seller then sees "Beckett Value" ("BV') and uses that to price the card. COMC holds the card until there is a sale and keeps the proceeds of any sale on account, COMC lists the card on its own website or on its Amazon.com storefront, Historically, and to this day, Beckett is in the middle of this transaction.

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Except that the great majority of cards I've had in my inventory at COMC (minor league cards, Japanese cards, oddballs, etc.) were NOT in fact listed in the Beckett database, nor did Beckett offer any "Beckett Value" thereof. That leads to:

10. Beckett assigns a market value to every item in COMC's inventory. COMC does not have an item that Beckett does not (or could not) value.

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Ok, that's just plain BS. They're saying they assign values to ALL cards, and even if they don't they could. Well, no s**t Sherlock! Anyone COULD assign values. So they're already introducing both non-factual elements and pure fantasy into their complaint.

11. Beckett is the only recognized publisher in the world that values sports memorabilia, It is both a service and content media publisher. It is as trusted and equivalent to the Kelley Blue Book ("KBB").

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I think F+W Media (Krause Publications) might take issue with that. So might Baseball Magazine in Japan. So might a good number of any sports card discussion forum members from the last 5 years who put more stock in eBay results.

Points 12-14 go on at length about Beckett's pricing process (which is completely irrelevant as COMC will be using its own pricing data).

As to the rest of the complaints, I think a simple invocation of Feist vs Rural will squash the "proprietary" nature of Beckett's checklist data. You can't copyright facts. Checklists are just facts, no different than names and phone numbers. All COMC really has to do is fill in the massive gaps and correct all the bad information from Beckett's data and the effectively no longer are using Beckett's data.

As absurd as the lawsuit appears to be, if COMC is forced to defend itself to any extent beyond the intitial complaint, attorney fees alone could substantially hurt the relatively small company.

LOL!

So Beckett now considers "BV" to mean "Beckett Value" and not "Book value". Wow, that's amazing, considering "BV" is used for quoting prices in other markets. (cars, etc.) They now think that only they are allowed to assign value to sports mem? HHAHAhAAAhAHahHAHahAHhAhaHAhAHHAHahAHaHAhHAhAHha.

If that were the case, then I think eBay should start suing Beckett for reimbursement for creating a marketplace in which value is derived. So if Beckett uses historical sales, then they owe eBay.

This has to be an April Fool's joke...

Austin said:

As absurd as the lawsuit appears to be, if COMC is forced to defend itself to any extent beyond the intitial complaint, attorney fees alone could substantially hurt the relatively small company.

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That may be what Beckett is banking on.

I use Beckett as a reference, not a card value publication. I do the same with SCD.

...to continue...

27 . COMC readily acknowledges that duplicating Beckett's intellectual property - its trade secrets- is a "very daunting task . . . it is a large amount of work to go recreate all the data," even though Beckett's data and content media cannot be legally "recreated."

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Seriously? They're saying no one can legally compile checklists without Beckett's data? A half dozen websites and the entire Standard Catalog would beg to differ. Incidentally, while Dr. Beckett's first Sport Americana Price Guide was published in something like 1978, a more comprehensive baseball card catalog was not published until 1988, with the first edition of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. That's 1988, or eight full years before the first edition of the "Beckett Almanac of Baseball Cards."

Somehow Beckett is equating "very daunting" as an admission of guilt. They effectively say it again in paragraph 28. Does that mean all the manufacturers who publish their own checklists are stealing that information from Beckett?

32. COMC is incapable of building a similar pricing process from its own sales data. Any process COMC could or would build would likewise be similar to or derivative of Beckett's pricing þrocess.

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Really? Why is that? Is this Beckett admitting that their proprietary pricing process is based purely on COMC sales data?

33. Beckett has at all times taken reasonable and appropriate steps to maintain the secrecy of its pricing processes and systems, including, but not limited, forbidding contract partners from using Beckett's database and pricing information in "any other way" or on any "other site or printed material[.]"

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No one cares how you secretly fabricate your arbitrary prices. Least of all COMC.

36. Beckett's pricing processes are neither generally known or readily ascertainable to Beckett's competitors. COMC, however, has Beckett's database as well as incentive to misappropriate the trade secrets that lie within Beckett's database. COMC has already shown a willingness to steal Beckett data and content by "scraping" its content from Beckett websites.

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Yet in paragraph 11, you basically said you have no competitors. Remember? "Beckett is the only recognized publisher in the world that values sports memorabilia."

Woah woah woah. Item 36 should have that thrown out, alone. That's an amazing amount of assumption being presented as fact.

Who the hell wrote up that suit? It's TERRIBLY written.

11. Beckett is the only recognized publisher in the world that values sports memorabilia, It is both a servioe and content media publisher. It is as trusted and equivalent to the Kelley Blue Book ("KBB").

umm... no. That's a pretty ballsy statement, IMO. Absurd and laughable, too. Austin and matfanofold are exactly right - Beckett is trying to force COMC to capitulate because of the prohibitive cost to defend itself.

Haters in the house!

Couldn't they just file an order to have it thrown out on the basis that the suit is attempting to claim rights over publicly available and compilable data?
I'm sure COMC could find a lawyer that would throw together something - cheaply - that would easily outdo the garbage in that suit.

Just went to COMC and you can't search cards right now. They are trying to create their own database.

This makes Beckett seem desperate--when was the last time a Beckett guide was more valuable for prices than to use as a checklist or info source?

IndyManning18 said:

Just went to COMC and you can't search cards right now. They are trying to create their own database.

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That was announced in December, and they have made their plans clear in every one of their social media outlets for the last 3 months. That's what the whole COMC Challenge is about. Beckett decided not to renew their licensing agreement, so COMC decided to roll their own. Apparently the agreement ended on March 31st, so they set up the Challenge as a way to crowd source the population of their keyword database while their employees work out the set listings.

DaClyde said:

Seriously? They're saying no one can legally compile checklists without Beckett's data? A half dozen websites and the entire Standard Catalog would beg to differ. Incidentally, while Dr. Beckett's first Sport Americana Price Guide was published in something like 1978, a more comprehensive baseball card catalog was not published until 1988, with the first edition of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. That's 1988, or eight full years before the first edition of the "Beckett Almanac of Baseball Cards."

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Unless I am misunderstanding your statement you are saying that after Beckett first published his annual price guide there was no other comprehensive catalog published until 1988? Well lets take a look at this.

As someone who was shocked and I mean shocked to see the first Beckett annual price guide in a book store in the summer of 1979, I know this is untrue. This is going to be hard for many to comprehend but prices didnt change on a weekly or monthly basis back then but on an annual basis. After Dr. Beckett published his first price guide he came out with an annual guide for many many years. Becket WAS the comprehensive catalog on all sports cards (each sport had their own book) as well as memorabilia. When the Beckett came out each year you would see guys poring over their inventory making pricing changes before the collectors caught up to the new pricing. I would toss a statement out there and say that Dr. Beckett did more to propel sports card collecting into the craziness that it was in the boom years of the 80's than any other person on the planet. Dr. Beckett put values on something that never before had values attached to it on an official basis.

Love it or hate it, Beckett's price guides turned this hobby into what it is today and brought it out of the domain of the young boys and made it an adult hobby. This change made every guy with a knack for statistics (As Dr. Beckett had a doctorate in if memory serves me right) a price analyst and price guides popped up all over every news stand. Again, remember this was pre-internet, pre-computer in every home so it was not as easy to make price adjustments at that time based on market activity. I do remember seeing a number of monthly guides pop up that challenged Beckett's dominance but those would drop away due mostly to being underfunded and unreliable with their pricing. Beckett got to be the Bible of pricing because they were just that, reliable. The had pricing analysts who watched the market, solicited dealers for key pricing (of which I was solicited and contributed my findings) and cataloged more sports cards than anyone ever did before.

Again, going from memory but this is not the first time Beckett got into a lawsuit with a competitor, they are just protecting their product. I do remember back in the early 80's one of the better monthly card pricing organizations (I believe it was called Car Pricing Update or CPU) that popped up literally used Beckett's checklists that they worked to compile and sold them as their own with their CPU pricing. Beckett took them to court and prevailed because Beckett was able to show that CPU used Becketts own proprietary information when selling their product to compete against Beckett. How did they do this? Beckett would make intentional "typos" in their checklists so unless the other companies proofread their content, they would miss these typos, allowing Beckett to prove their information was lifted and used without being paid for this use.

I am by no means a Beckett fan boy. I have met Dr. Beckett many times and used his price guides religiously (like everyone else did) but I lost faith in them when they changed their content in the early 2000's and then sold the business to a company that had no business running it. Beckett literally was held in the highest regard back in the day and it is sad to see how they have fallen. Now if you ask an old timer who was collecting and selling before Beckett first published his annual price guide, they will look at him in disgust and blame him for all the changes in the hobby. To each their own I guess.

mchenrycards said:

Unless I am misunderstanding your statement you are saying that after Beckett first published his annual price guide there was no other comprehensive catalog published until 1988? Well lets take a look at this.

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I'm not saying Beckett never published another book after the first one. But the Beckett Price Guide is still basically the same as it was 30 years ago, each new edition just tacking on the latest releases. It covers the mainstream sets, with a smattering of the more readily accessible oddball stuff. It left out an enormous amount of regional, vintage and minor league sets. It wasn't until the Standard Catalog hit the shelves that anyone was really pursuing such a comprehensive listing. Which Beckett didn't do until 1996 (though their Alphabetical book was always more comprehensive than the price guide). So while their price guides were THE de facto standard, and the only "big" book of the time, they were far from comprehensive. They were just the only real game in town. I'm not attempting to de-legitimize Beckett's place in the history of the hobby, just point out that they are clearly not playing with a full deck in their current pursuits.

Either way, the current corporate owners of what is left of Dr. Beckett's legacy are trying to claim they have the only set of checklists and that anyone else who might want to build a set of checklists can only do so by stealing from Beckett. Both assertions which are incorrect.

I feel bad for the handful of hobbyists who actually work for Beckett. I get the feeling that if they were given a little more freedom, the whole brand could remove some of the tarnish it has accumulated in the last decade.

DaClyde said:

Seriously? They're saying no one can legally compile checklists without Beckett's data?

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You didn't know? it's impossible to take a Topps released Sell Sheet, and a Topps released Checklist and compile a complete checklist.

Only Beckett holds the master key that allows one to take those two PDFs and use the information within to create a master checklist in an excel document.

vwnut13 said:

You didn't know? it's impossible to take a Topps released Sell Sheet, and a Topps released Checklist and compile a complete checklist.

Only Beckett holds the master key that allows one to take those two PDFs and use the information within to create a master checklist in an excel document.

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But that's a SUPER SECRET process.

I have seen situations like this in the securities industry. While the reference data is obtainable from a variety of sources, Beckett is claiming that their database is proprietary and that COMC is using data sourced from them without a contract to do so. The last time I saw this happen with an investment company, it was so bad that the client had to effectively scrub all of the reference data from the vendor out of their database and start over, which it sounds like COMC is currently doing.

wish Jeff N was still here to tell us he is a lawyer

My first thought is that beckett is going to sue COMC to put them out of business by forcing them to pay legal fees to keep defending themselves