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Copyright issues involving Fantasy Sports

1. Legal Issues on the Copyright of English Premiership Fixtures:

All Premiership football fixtures appear to be copyright of the FA Premier League (via Football DataCo Ltd). Be careful about the use of such fixtures on your website, it is understood that the FA would expect a licence fee for the reproduction of such information. It has been reported by the Telegraph and by the BBC that the expected license fee is as much as £250 plus VAT for each club. DataCo's view is that:

'In order to display the Fixture Lists you must either obtain the necessary license from Football DataCo or be an officially nominated fanzine for your chosen club. If you are not nominated as the official club fanzine and you do not wish to purchase a fixture license you can post a link to your clubs official site.

Without nominated fanzine status or a license there is no provision for any fixture to appear in advance of the match being played. Mentioning more than one fixture will not be accepted'.

November 2004 ECJ Ruling

See the link below for news on the European court of justice ruling which indicated that the Premier League and Football League cannot demand payment from media and pools companies over publication of fixture lists and match information although per below this is not accepted by DataCo:

http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,1563,1347379,00.html

Copied bit from the summary PRESS RELEASE Nş 89/04
9 November 2004 Judgment of the Court in Cases C-46/02, C-203/02, C-338/02 and C-444/02

'Nor do the professional football leagues need to put any particular effort into monitoring the accuracy of the data on league matches when the list is made up because those leagues are directly involved in the creation of those data. Even the verification of the accuracy of the contents of fixture lists during the season (for example, following the postponement of a match) does not entail substantial investment. The presentation of a football fixture list, too, is closely linked to the creation as such of the data which make up the list and does not require investment independent of the investment in the creation of its constituent data. It follows that neither the obtaining, verification, nor presentation of the contents of a football fixture list attests to substantial investment which could justify protection by the sui generis right provided for by the directive'. 

However we understand that DataCo's view of the above ECJ ruling is as follows:

'The EC ruling was actually an ECJ (European Court of Justice) opinion which has been passed back to the National courts of the countries concerned for ratification. The Swedish, Finnish and Greek national courts have not yet sat to consider the ECJ opinion. The UK case 
concerned a disagreement between the BHB (British Horse Racing Board) and William Hill. The UK Appeal Court heard the case on 28 June 2005 and have not yet given their verdict in that case.

The UK leagues were seeking additional rights to Copyright, in which they have already had a favorable ruling from 1959. The case before the ECJ did not concern Copyright but a new European Union law called Database Rights (1996). The opinion of the ECJ was that football fixtures did not qualify for Sui Generis rights in a Database because the financial investment made by football was too biased towards creating the fixtures. This opinion does not affect the previous Copyright enjoyed by the leagues for the last 45 years. It is on this basis that the leagues are issuing their licenses, as they always have done. Using the fixtures and other data without being licensed will leave a company open to prosecution under the leagues copyright and copyright in database protection.'

Other weblinks of relevance:

http://www.zoopus.com/?page_id=13

http://www.wsc.co.uk/webroundup/web226.html

http://www.bsad.org/0506/reports/fixtures_letter.html

 

2. USA Fantasy Sports Statistics Legal Ruling:

For news on a court ruling in the USA involving the use by a Fantasy Sports promoter of statistical Major League baseball data, see this link:

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/5856576

Some excerpts are:

'Baseball and its players have no right to prevent the use of names and playing records, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Ann Medler in St. Louis ruled in a 49-page summary judgment.

Major League Baseball claimed that intellectual property laws and so-called "right of publicity" make it illegal for fantasy leagues to make money off the identities and stats of professional players.

But even if the players could claim the right of publicity against commercial ventures by others, Medler wrote, the First Amendment takes precedent because CBC, which runs CDM Fantasy Sports, is disseminating the same statistical information found in newspapers every day.

"The names and playing records of major league baseball players as used in CBC's fantasy games are not copyrightable," Medler wrote. "Therefore, federal copyright law does not pre-empt the players' claimed right of publicity."

The ruling brings some relief to more than 300 businesses that run online fantasy leagues and have awaited the outcome of the lawsuit. In fantasy sports leagues, fans draft major leaguers and teams win or lose based on the statistical success of the actual players in major league games'.

 

 

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