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U.S. Supreme Court Refuses to Intervene in Dispute over Fantasy Sports Game
The U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to intercede in an ongoing dispute between Major League Baseball (MLB) and CBC Distribution and Marketing Inc. (CBC), a fantasy sports business that caters to a quarter million customers.
The 2005 lawsuit was initiated by CBC when it was banned from using players’ names in its fantasy games because it failed to obtain a license from a subsidiary of MLB. CBC argued that players’ names and baseball statistics were not the intellectual property of MLB as this information is readily available in newspapers and on the Internet. MLB’s Internet media arm, which was later joined by the pro-baseball players’ union, claimed that CBC’s actions violated the players’ publicity rights protected by state law. A right to publicity is a person’s right to control and profit from the commercial use of his name and likeness.
CBC was successful at both the district court and appeal court levels. The 8 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated that CBC’s “first amendment rights in offering its fantasy baseball products supersede the players’ rights of publicity.” It was finally strike three for MLB on Monday, June 2, 2008 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment to hear the case.
The significance of this decision for the $1.5 billion fantasy sports industry is that it permits companies to use players’ names and statistics without paying licensing fees. This translates into higher profits for companies like CBC which offer a variety of fantasy baseball games, with entry fees as high as $1000 and annual sales of more than $3.4 million in 2004 and 2005.
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