Question for those coaches and random STers out there.
Once an athlete pays for a coaching program, who “owns” the workouts? You’re paying the coach for guidance and for the workouts. Once you receive and pay for the workout sets, does the athlete own them?
Example would be if you receive your workouts via Training Peaks. When you no longer use a coach, do you own those workouts (with your comments and trending) or does the coach still own them?
Thoughts?
Seems like the coaching program would have a hard time making a claim unless it is unique. Maybe a better chance if you took their entire program and sold it as your own.
That said, I’d like to own a piece of the long weekend run. 
Most likely the specific contract you signed would govern the “ownership” of the workouts.
I would view this as a typical intellectual property rights issue under the part governing “copyrights” more than anything else.
A coach can issue your plans and mark them as “copyright name, date”. What this generally means (in US and Canada) is that you cannot reproduce the material without his permission. It is intended to restrain you from reproducing or redistributing the material (whether for profit or loss or charity…it plain doesn’t matter). Often there is some tolerance to reproduction for private use, but that is not implicit everywhere, and is often expressly stipulated if permitted, rather than not permitted (I think). That the copyright owner provides you with a copy does not grant you the copyrights…or “rights to copy”. That he provides the material to you only grants you permission to use the material.
For example, you cannot hire a coach, get his training plans (marked with copyright) for $200 and then post the plan for your whole club to see and use…whether you do that for free or if they pay you a little to reimburse your 200 bucks. That they pay you does not mean they are “buying” the plan from the coach, and the copyright infringement exists whether they pay you or not. You lack the right to redistribute, period, and their purchase to you did not in any way justify their copies of the material.
That’s my understanding, and I think a training plan falls under copyright more than anything else in IP law, like trademarks or patents.
Paul
I didn’t even think about the reselling/posting aspect. I am thinking just for personal use. To reference back to last season, what worked, etc. If you paid for the workouts and you no longer can see them, what did you pay for?
I agree it’s a different issue if it’s copyrighted, etc in regards to anything but personal use.
It depends. There is a work for hire doctrine which governs the ownership of the copyrighted work.
Furthermore, the development of workouts most likely does not fall into the category of works that may be copyrighted.
For instance, food recipes are not copyrightable, I think there is similarity between a recipe for food and a workout schedule which is a mere recipe for performing well in sports. Business methods and other methodologies are similarly not copyrightable, i.e., they do not fall into the category of works that may be copyrighted.
Most likely the workouts and their use would be governed by a click-on or shrink-wrap license that governs their use when you signed up on the website.
Ah, trickier.
Well, I suppose you can’t expect coach to leave your program up and available indefinitely, if that is how you got them. Did you not create a local copy, or was not a local copy in your mailbox? What about the entries in your training log…did those not describe your workouts? You can refer to those without any fear of infringing. Copyrights refer to copying things, and can’t stop you from learning from reading what you had access to. You can use that “knowledge and recollection” unless you signed some agreement otherwise, and that is covered in a different area of the IPR and employment (i suppose) laws. I’m just saying, it ain’t the copyright part.
However, your coach is not at all obliged to provide you with perpetual access to his “copy distribution” service (in essence) to see the workouts “recipes” he wrote for you. Basically, your permission or license to use “those copies” has expired.
If you wrote a training log, you should have all the info you need to do what you suppose you need to do. If you wrote it and passed a copy up to him to review it, I would guess a good argument can be made that you have some rights to those, but you probably didn’t specifically mark them as such. You should have a copy of them somewhere… maybe you can ask your ex-coach for those. The downside to that is, your coach may have destroyed the copies you provided to him, as would not be unexpected if he had no need for them.
If he has them, requesting them can’t hurt. But there is probably nothing that says he HAS to give them back if they exist, unless you made some agreement about return of those copies upon expiry. If you don’t get them back, it is actually your fault for not having your original copies of your logs, and not being clear about original copyright ownership of those in the first place.
That’s how I see it. Hope you had good logs.
Paul
I’d say the workouts are his and the logs are yours.
The complicating factor is that there is no wayin trainingpeaks to delete workout descriptions without deleting the logs.
From my own perspective, anything we have dne already is yours. Any preplanned workouts I may have put in there for the outweeks and not been paid for are mine and I would not feel bad about going in and deleting them if our relationship ends. I’ve never felt the need to do it before though.
You guys are thinking too much…
Either I start an account for them at TP.com or I move their existing account into mine. I pay for the account and coach them. When we part ways, I remove their account from mine and they pick up the cost thereafter. In 7 yrs of coaching full time I’ve never even thought about who “owns” the workouts, the data, etc. I couldn’t imagine having the conversation: “thanks for trusting me with your athletic goals for x month/years. BTW, now that we are parting ways, them workouts is mine, all your data is mine, contracts, copyrights, blah, blah.” It’s just not that formal or complicated.
You guys are thinking too much…
Either I start an account for them at TP.com or I move their existing account into mine. I pay for the account and coach them. When we part ways, I remove their account from mine and they pick up the cost thereafter. In 7 yrs of coaching full time I’ve never even thought about who “owns” the workouts, the data, etc. I couldn’t imagine having the conversation: “thanks for trusting me with your athletic goals for x month/years. BTW, now that we are parting ways, them workouts is mine, all your data is mine, contracts, copyrights, blah, blah.” It’s just not that formal or complicated.
Glad to see that I am not the only one that thinks that way. The only reason I can see for doing it would be to purposefully make sure that athlete can’t review the data and continue to get better. Our sport is cumulative in that you build upon what you did before. That includes reviewing past workouts and what worked/didn’t work. It forces one to start over from “scratch” per say.
You guys are thinking too much…
Either I start an account for them at TP.com or I move their existing account into mine. I pay for the account and coach them. When we part ways, I remove their account from mine and they pick up the cost thereafter. In 7 yrs of coaching full time I’ve never even thought about who “owns” the workouts, the data, etc. I couldn’t imagine having the conversation: “thanks for trusting me with your athletic goals for x month/years. BTW, now that we are parting ways, them workouts is mine, all your data is mine, contracts, copyrights, blah, blah.” It’s just not that formal or complicated.
same here, they are free to do whatever they want with it.
Dan - contact TP or register to pick up the $$ and keep using your username and pass. you should be able to access YOUR logs…
How do you feel about someone paying for one of your plans and then sharing it with a bunch of people? I understand you have plans (very good ones) that people choose from a list based on their goals and weekly training time. So it not a plan made specifically for that athlete. Do you mind them giving it to their mates who have similar goals and time?
That’s very simple: the plan is a product or service, just like any other. Using a product or service you didn’t pay for is stealing. While I’ve learned that people in this sport generally do the right thing, I’m sure many have used a training plan they didn’t pay for. Nothing I can do about it, other to say I’ve hidden a code in the plans that allows me to track the IP address of every user, I generally go to every Ironman race, and am not above shaking someone down for my $2 at mile 18…
Seriously though, I hope people chose to do the right thing.
i actually own the swim run brick. you want i sell it to you so you have the full set?
I am not sure I understand.
If a coach told you to go out and run (4 minutes hard/2 minutes easy) X 5, which is a great workout by the way, what’s stopping you from doing that workout any time you want, even after you stop working with that coach?
I think this just came down to a simple issue that a coach/athlete contract ended and the coach did not continue to keep alive the TP subscription. Most coaches take a portion of what they charge the athlete to fund the TP subscription that lives during the relationship. Therefore the athlete didn’t see the system anymore. It wasn’t a legal issue of “ownership” in the legal sense that the initial post seemed to be asking.
answer to your question, fleck, is: “nothing”.
to embellish it:
“nothing at all”.
Paul
Thanks, Paul!
It was getting kinda complicated there and as our man Jonnyo likes to say “I am comfuse”
FYI - I still use some of the workouts that my running coach gave me thirty years ago! Of course I never paid for any of that back then