Law of Cards: Beckett Sues Zistle Over Checklists

So basically if someone wanted to recreate zistle, but even better, they would eventually get sued by beckett? no matter how they attained the information?

beckett is a joke there checklists are incomplete, i subscribed to them for one month,and they didnt have half the cards i had they are a complete joke and rip off.zistle i am sure they have more cards then they do. and if they dont you are allowed to enter them yourself. zistle is a great website.

This is a bogus lawsuit. The users of Zistle have manually entered the information from cards they owned. Zistle has many incomplete checklists because it is all user entered.

You can still see Beckett’s checklist data without a login, but you are limited to 25 cards per page. And you are probably correct, that most of Zistle’s data does not come from Beckett. A primary example of that is how lots of the sets seem to be assembled at Zistle one card at a time as collectors were adding them. There were, and likely still are, lots of incomplete checklists there. What I’m now curious about is whether Beckett is just arbitrarily attempting to say it owns all checklists anywhere, or whether they will actually be going after a defense of their particular arrangement of the data being reproduced.

I do hope I haven’t been making Beckett’s case for them with my comments. They really are not looking intelligent enough to make those cases themselves, as very little accurate information is included in their complaints. And given Paul’s earlier article about them effectively plagiarizing their own lawsuits to throw at each opponent, they may not even know what any of the other sites really have. They may just be firing off a barrage of nuisance lawsuits in an attempt to get all the other places to roll over.

Personally I thought most people at Zistle had been getting their info from cardboardconnection.com or direct from Topps checklists on the cards, or from Topps website (or Panini, Upper Deck or whoever) since Beckett requires a membership to even view their checklists now days.

As I read Beckett’s complaint more closely, I notice that they are not entirely factual in Paragraph 16:

“Beckett provides access to this data for a fee, and there is a market for licenses to access and use checklists and pricing data.”

Beckett does NOT charge a fee for access to their checklists. Anyone can search the website and access all of the checklist information they offer without even needing to register for the site. What Beckett charges for are the collection management features and extra sorting and searching options (as well as the pricing, which doesn’t – or at least shouldn’t – figure into this lawsuit).

So effectively, Beckett has been giving away this information for free. And I know for a fact that Zistle neither 100% reproduces Beckett’s information, nor does Beckett offer 100% of the checklists that Zistle has in their system. There are some technicalities here that might offer Zistle some relief. I am also curious if they would fall under any sort of protections that might be available to web hosts or service providers against the actions of their users or customers; after all, nearly the entire Zistle database content has been built by users and not the actual staff of Zistle.

Beckett is failing to provide what collectors want, and are largely unresponsive to user feedback when it comes to improving their system. The result is several sites popping up, built and maintained by the very customer base Beckett has ignored. Unfortunately, almost all of those sites made the mistake of using Beckett’s data as a quick way to populate their own databases, without cleaning up the data first, which gives Beckett a easy road to shutting down any potential competition.

Because Beckett is no longer owned and run by hobby people, they don’t care about the “community”, they only care about the bottom line. These other sites, by catering more directly to the online collecting community, are a direct thread to Beckett’s bottom line.

From Beckett’s perspective, they have an opportunity to smash competitors who are eating into their share of the market. What they don’t see, from the hobby’s perspective, is that they are making themselves the villain and directly attacking the customers they should be serving. I contribute to several of the sites in question, because Beckett does not serve my needs as a collector. They don’t cover the international card market and they are always years late getting minor league sets added to their database. I worry about sites being shut down after all the time and effort I put into them, and all of my work being lost because someone else copied & pasted a bunch of Beckett checklists without first cleaning the data. Propagating bad Beckett data doesn’t help anyone. And Beckett has a lot of bad data.

I think it’s pretty obvious that Beckett is simply trying to remove a competitor. They should spend more time fixing the MANY errors and omissions in their checklists than worry about a competitor that few people have ever even heard of…this giving it much more promotion by word of mouth.

I have been trying to get Beckett to fix some of it’s NASCAR checklists for years- since around 2000- yet they can’t be bothered. This is even with me offering them photographs of my own extensive collection, they still say “it doesn’t exist”.

This seems like a waste of time for Beckett. I currently use Zistle to organize my cards and have completed a few trades on there as well. If you were to go to Zistle’s site you would find many “missing cards” from the checklists, however, members can add missing cards and their information as well as pictures. As Patrick pointed out, Topps -along with every other card collecting company- supply their own checklists, so I really don’t understand how this lawsuit is beneficial for Beckett.

It won’t be the information Beckett is claiming they own, it is the arrangement of the information, or the “presentation” they use. It is particularly easy to identify Beckett checklist data from the late 1990s to mid-00s because they did a lot of abbreviating and truncating to save space. It is most likely those listings that Beckett will use to prove their case. Other sites are reproducing Beckett’s very specific version of the checklists, and that is what will likely win the case for them. If the offending sites just had a higher threshold of data quality, the whole issue could have been avoided.

Topps produces checklists for their products. How can Beckett claim they created it?

The biggest thing some sites have done to make themselves vulnerable to lawsuits like this that people just wholesale copy & paste the text right off Beckett’s site. As a result, all the abbreviations, truncations and naming conventions that Beckett used when building their checklists is repeated. If sites would do the bare minimum of cleaning up the listings they have copied so that they are, in fact, just the facts rather than a character by character duplication, they would be better off. Beckett would still sue them (because Beckett is just another company to have sold its soul to “invenstors” who have no knowledge or interest in the company’s particular field or market), but at least the suit would hold no water whatsoever.

If Beckett’s listing for a card says this:

2005 Upper Deck Hall of Fame Signs of Cooperstown Quads Autograph Gold #BSAY Banks/Ozzie/Apar/Yount

The other site damn well better say something more like this:

2005 Upper Deck Hall of Fame Signs of Cooperstown Quad Autographs Gold #BSAY Ernie Banks / Ozzie Smith / Luis Aparicio / Robin Yount

I suspect a lot of the “errors” in Beckett’s catalog that they have refused to correct for the last 20 years are exactly those kinds of deliberate mistakes mentioned in the article and referenced in previous lawsuits. It is up to the other checklist sites not to reproduce those errors. They are bad for the hobby as they propagate misinformation. I’m one of the world’s few collectors of Hensley Meulens cards, and both Beckett and the Standard Catalog have erroneously listed an error for his 1990 Classic card for as long as the checklist has been documented. The error card does not exist and is a real annoyance when a player collector spends years chasing a card that doesn’t exist because it was included as a copy-protection mechanism.