For the past eight years I've run a fantasy football league for a group of friends and colleagues. It's strictly small time: The $10-per-owner annual fee covers the cost of hosting the league, with enough left over for minor prizes: The Super Bowl winner and total points winner get their $10 back; the Super Bowl winner also gets a small trophy.
We're people who play for fun, not money. If the cost of playing went up substantially, we'd have to reconsider our hobby.
Which is why I find a recent move by Major League Baseball to be, well, disturbing. MLB is claiming that they own all the statistics of their players, implying that fantasy leagues must pay royalties to MLB if they want to use their stats.
In other words, "all your stats are belong to us."
MLB's argument is based on the established principle that players — and the league — have the right to control the commercial use of their "names and likenesses." That's why a golf-club manufacturer can't use a picture of Tiger Woods to sell clubs unless he gets Tiger's permission — and pays him handsomely.
But what MLB is asserting is that a professional ballplayer's statistics fall under that doctrine. So even if you count all of a player's at-bats yourself, you still have to pay the league in order to use that information for commercial purposes.
A fallback argument is that even if you can use the statistics, you cannot use player or team names and images without paying MLB.
I don't play fantasy baseball, but if MLB were to win this suit, other leagues — including the NFL — could try the same thing. Fantasy sports would likely get a lot more expensive and centrally controlled, and I'd have to find a new hobby.
I'm no lawyer, but MLB's case seems shaky to me, especially regarding statistics. Private services have long provided game statistics to newspapers, for example. Those services are also how fantasy sites get the statistics they need. MLB never had a problem with that, even though such services are clearly profiting from the league's "names and likenesses."
Article comments
1 - DaneJasHo
UNBELIEVABLE! Greed, greed, greed. I have just thrown in the towel on baseball! It has been a dying sport for a while, but I've hung in there. No more! This is it. Goodbye baseball! You are so far out of touch with reality that you're no longer worth anyone's time and/or attention. Good riddance!!
2 - Matthew T. Sussman
Can we have the hold stat?
3 - Jared Wright
Wow. Laughable. Biting the hand that feeds. Baseball is such a statistics-driven sport, I'd wager it benefits more than a lot of other sports because of fantasy play.
The case the NBA lost strikes me as similar, and I don't think there's much to differentiate the two. So I'd expect MLB to lose here.
4 - Ty
This is a pathetic attempt by MLB to cash in on the ever growing popularity of fantasy baseball.
At best they might have an argument with commercial services that charge a fee for fantasy baseball.
For example, Yahoo is free, but has a special league with more options for a league fee of $120. I am thinking MLB wants a cut of that, and perhaps they are entitled to that.
If they ARE entitled, Yahoo and the like should not go with the kneejerk reaction of raising the prices on this stuff, but rather slash it to free as well. That would be a HUGE f**k you to MLB.
P.S. To the poster above, the difference between the NBA and MLB cases is what they are asserting. The NBA went with the copyright argument, which was an easy loser. The MLB here is trying something clever by going with the "likeness" idea. They are trying to turn this into a tort case, not IP. And I think they've at least got a better shot with this.
5 - Condor
After seeing what MLB does in the realm of little league licensing... it's almost not surprising. What is kind of revealing in retrospect is that this legal action didn't come sooner.