Legal Research

Life is just a Fantasy

By Mark Lewis

On June 2, 2008 (one week ago) the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Major League Baseball Advanced Media v. C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing, Inc (2007) 505 F.3d 818.¹, the Fantasy Sports case. To backtrack a bit; for those who are unfamiliar, Fantasy Sports (or rotisserie and many other names), is the pursuit where players “select” teams of players from real sports teams and compete against other fantasy sports players based upon the statistics compiled by the players they have selected, Wikipedia Definition here.

Fantasy sports have evolved over the last 30 years or so, starting with a group of friends who kept track of the statistics manually, which as you might guess was labour intensive. Fantasy sports took off when personal computers became affordable and with the advent of the internet, whereby statistics were compiled and tracked more easily and players were able to form more sophisticated leagues and compete with other players from anywhere in the world. In short, Fantasy sports became a multi-million dollar industry in the 90’s. Fantasy sports and fantasy sports players are also credited in many quarters with helping to bring Major League Baseball back off of life-support after the catastrophic strike of 1994. Professional sports leagues and professional athletes became acutely aware when fantasy sports started generating millions of dollars in revenue. So after 25 years or so of fantasy sports a lawsuit was launched, referenced above, whereby Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association, tried to take control of Fantasy Sports asserting intellectual property rights over player names and statistics, which are readily available from many sources and have been for over 100 years. I’m not going to go into details here but there is a nice summary in the Harvard Law Review here . In short, in 2007 the U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Cir.(Mo.) ruled that baseball did not have these rights and that Fantasy Sports could go on using the names and statistics without obtaining a license. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling by declining to hear the case, which means that millions of people can go on pursuing their pastime without having to pay a special licensing fee.Summary from last week. So it seems that the issue is settled and a fundamental shift in a multi-million dollar industry was averted.

1. 8th Cir.(Mo.) Oct 16, 2007

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 09, 2008 (boomark / email).