Football Dataco, a company that protects the rights of English and Scottish football league fixtures, brought a case against Yahoo! UK, betting firm Stan James, and sports information provider Enetpulse in the UK courts. Football Dataco accused the companies of infringing on their intellectual property rights by using the fixture lists without paying for them. However, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that football fixture lists cannot be protected by copyright if there is no creativity involved in compiling them.
According to the EU’s database directive, copyright protection only applies to the structure of databases, not to their contents. Intellectual creation, a condition for eligibility for copyright protection, only exists when the selection or the arrangement of the data involves originality, and that the originality criterion did not apply when the setting up of the database is dictated by “technical considerations, rules or constraints which leave no room for creative freedoms”. The European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) was happy about the court’s decision, and a representative said it “should put an end to copyright claims for sporting lists”.
Filed under: IP and Competition Tagged: | copyright, databases, Enetpulse, European Court of Justice, European Gaming and Betting Association, football league fixtures, intellectual property rights, Stan James, Yahoo! UK
0 comments:
Post a Comment