Reply to "Course name"

I get this, Mark. Not an enviable task doing this. Thank you.

I understand the reasons for your position. I still regard this as appearing to be tantamount to a solution looking for a problem. My humble opinion is that we are in effect promulgating dead letter law, with which there is bound to be selective enforcement, which potentially creates its own problems, as we see.

We could require certification clients to sign an agreement in which they are prohibited from sharing their course with another event. While this could reduce the number of infractions, we would still have no way of preventing anyone from downloading a certified course or taking a screenshot of the certification map, then modifying it for their own purposes - as happens today. How would we even know who is doing this?

Would it be more useful for us to satisfy ourselves with the knowledge that events that use certifications purchased by another entity are at least using a certified course as opposed to courses that are created with one of the many inaccurate online apps? Isn't this more in accordance with our basic goals?

Apart from you taking your valuable personal time to send "cease and desist" emails to RDs when a violation happens to come to your attention, Mark, a toothless rule seems to me to serve little purpose. "Legislating" ethical behavior in this sense doesn't strike me as a worthwhile endeavor. What are we publicly offering our products for if not to encourage the use of properly measured and recorded courses? Since we have no way at present to stop USATF.org visitors from "poaching" courses for their own uses, why not take a look at handling this availability differently?

Here's one thought:

1. Make available publicly only a list of certified courses.
2. The searchable list will be the same as today's except:
   1. it will allow users to see maps and certificates only after they pay a modest fee to USATF for each session. Otherwise, only the flat list.
   2. These documents will be protected with "Anti-Scraping" technology so that users will not be able to take a screenshot of the map. Users will thus be only able to see whether there is a certified course of the desired distance in the applicable location. A visitor to our site could take a photo of the screen, but we would auto-generate digital watermarks for all displayed maps which would make such photos less than useful.
   3. Users could then apply for their own version of the course by paying a more substantial fee -say, $350.00 - to have a measurer of their choice access the map and certificate and create a new certification map and certificate with the new number and the old expiration date.
3. While this approach wouldn't prevent someone from poaching a certification map from a race website and then modifying it for their own purposes, or creating an entirely new map with the existing certification number, it would at least eliminate the common practice of "re-purposing" our certifications from USATF.org by events that paid no one anything to use them.