The Sports Network is counting on a relatively short legal precedent in a lawsuit accusing ESPN and its SportsTicker subsidiary of stealing, copying and reselling data The Sports Network collects from minor league baseball games, attorneys said last week.
Lawyers for The Sports Network, which filed the lawsuit on May 14 in New York, accuse SportsTicker of unauthorized use of passwords to access updates, box scores and statistics on sportsnetwork.com, which compiles and sells data through a contract with Minor League Baseball. SportsTicker previously held that contract.
ESPN wouldnt comment other than to issue a statement saying the claims were without merit.
The Sports Network attorneys argue SportsTicker is unfairly competing by putting on espn.com and reselling to clients, such as usatoday.com, the data that The Sports Network spends tens of thousands of dollars to collect. The Sports Network attorneys claim that the company lost $100,000 from customers who bought data from ESPN instead of The Sports Network.
Theyre free-riding on the backs of TSNs effort, time, money and expense, said The Sports Network attorney Fred Perkins, of Morris, Cohen, Singer & Weinstein.
Copyright law does not prevent parties from retransmitting facts, such as sports scores. However, sports leagues and publishers have successfully remedied this by forcing anyone who wants to view such data to agree to certain terms. The Sports Network requires such an agreement, and such conditions, legal experts said, will make ESPNs case hard to argue.
Courts that have looked at this have generally enforced that contract, said Michael Overly, a partner at Foley & Lardner who specializes in online law.
Because the key arguments in such cases rest on relatively short legal history, though, a final decision could go either way based on one judge or jurys interpretation of the facts. In similar cases, The Sports Networks argument has been upheld because of those parties ability to appeal to basic business sensibilities.
If you were to assume that everybody was allowed to take the data, would anybody go into the plaintiffs business? said Andrew Deutsch, a media law attorney at New Yorks Piper Rudnick.
Nonetheless, if this case goes to court, neither side, say experts, has the overwhelming legal advantage.
Until we have a lot more cases in this area, Overly said, I dont think anythings a slam dunk.