Debate over baseball stats isn’t a fantasy

Is a box score line like “HR — Pujols (1)” the intellectual property of Major League Baseball?

The answer lies at the heart of a legal dispute that could shape the future of online fantasy sports leagues, a fast-growing activity pursued by an estimated 15 million people nationwide.

MLB recently was minted as the dominant player in online fantasy baseball leagues through a five-year deal with the players union worth more than $50 million, Last week it denied a stand-alone sublicense to St. Louis-based CDM Fantasy Sports, a company that runs its own leagues as well as provides backing for leagues run through various media outlets.

That refusal from MLB, CDM says, included an assertion that the company would not even be permitted to run a fantasy league containing only player names and basic statistical data.

Just three days after that rejection, CDM responded with a federal lawsuit against MLB Advanced Media seeking a declaratory judgment that it is not infringing upon MLB’s rights. CDM executives claim the use of raw data like player names and statistics exist entirely in the public domain.

“All we care about are names and numbers associated with performance,” said Rudy Telscher, a St. Louis intellectual property lawyer representing CDM, which for several years held a fantasy licensing contract with MLB that expired Dec. 31. “Most people, I think, understand that stats aren’t really protected by intellectual property law.”

CDM is now running games on its Web site, cdmsports.com, against MLB’s wishes.

Bob Bowman, MLB Advanced Media chief executive, said he has not seen CDM’s legal filing but that there is no legal issue with the use of statistical results. More of a gray area, however, is the permitted use of player names for commercial gain.

“All of the [players associations] across the major sports have generally held that the commercial use of player names without a license is an infringement of their rights,” Bowman said.

Said Greg Ambrosius, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association: “This is a very big deal. The repercussions could hit everybody in the industry. Are stats licensed property? It doesn’t get much more fundamental than that.”

In most fantasy leagues, fans draft real-life players to their mock teams and are then ranked based on the actual statistical performance of those players. By relying solely on raw results, fantasy leagues typically reward fans who avoid selecting players who are more popular than productive.

Fans often pay to enter fantasy leagues, with fees sometimes exceeding $1,000. The money, minus administrative expenses, are distributed as prizes to top performers.

Baseball leagues claim roughly half of the 15 million population of fantasy league players, according to several surveys, with Internet sites like yahoo.com and ESPN.com running large fantasy operations.

MLB, however, is seeking to begin a dramatic reworking of its online fantasy leagues to include video highlights, wireless applications and modified games to allow for more casual play. In recent years, fantasy football leagues have sprinted far past baseball in popularity, largely because of the reduced time commitment required to play.

“To say we need to stay with the status quo is unacceptable,” Bowman said. “The core fantasy players, we want them to keep playing, of course. But what else can we do to make this more accessible and more entertaining for a much broader fan base? That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

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