Ed. Note: This guest post is contributed by Sandra McAubre, she writes on the topic of sports management degree programs . She welcomes your comments at her email id: sandra1.mcaubre@gmail.com.
It’s no secret that litigation is rife in the US of A – we sue each other for even the most trivial of issues. That’s why we have a woman taking a burger joint to court seeking compensation for injuries sustained because she poured scalding hot coffee over herself – and the eatery was forced to cough up thousands of dollars because the woman was stupid enough to burn herself but smart enough to use this as an excuse to take the joint for a ride. The world of sports too sees its share of litigation – we have agencies suing each other for “stealing” or encroaching on clients; we have sports franchises being sued by fans who were injured during the course of a game, by a stray ball or an overeager and unruly spectator; and we have players suing their owners for breach of contract and various other perceived and real slights.
Now however, the world of fantasy sports too is being pulled into the world of litigation; for those in the dark, fantasy sports is what you play when you choose your own team of players from major leagues like the NBA, NFL and other sports; they’re all currently playing professionals and each comes with their own value. So you’re allowed to pick a team within certain restrictions, and based on their individual performance in real-life games, you can amass points and money.
Fantasy sports are coming into their own as big money spinners in the online world – they’re popular and addictive, and if you’re a sports fan, the idea of owning your own team is heady, even if it’s only in your fantasies. However, the dark clouds of litigation are looming large over this profitable venture as the major leagues (the real ones) are gunning for their fantasy counterparts and trying to push them out of business by using the right of publicity to assert that the statistics generated by professional players (which are the basis of the points accumulated by fantasy league owners) are their property.
In a major victory for the online world, the case filed by Major League Baseball failed to set a precedent. However, because the right of publicity is not clearly delineated and is a hotchpotch of state common law and state statutes, the NFL is now trying its hand at ousting these online upstarts through another litigation attempt, and if the ruling in this case is different from the one the MLB was handed, then other professional sports leagues too will be inclined to jump into the fray. MLB too could reopen its interests in the case in other states.
The end result of all these litigation attempts is that we could soon see a variety of rules for each sport in several different states – so one state would have completely different rules regarding baseball or football or any other sport from another. The confusion would only lead to chaos in the online world of fantasy sports, so unless a federal law is brought into effect through the federal courts, this mess could get more tangled than it is right now.
