Stan James and data provider Sportradar this week lost the latest round of their court battle with UK football authorities over the latter’s right to claim copyright and a licence fee for use of “live” match information.
Handing down his ruling in favour of Football Dataco (FDC), established by the English and Scottish professional football leagues to protect, market and exploit their official match-related data, Appeal Court judge Sir Robin Jacob described Stan James and Sportradar’s activities as “commercial piracy”.
This week’s decision related to Football Dataco’s Football Live Database, which provides time-stamped data on events such as goalscorers, own goals, penalties, red and yellow cards, used under licence by third parties such as PA Sport to provide the basis of live stats feeds to media organisations such as the BBC and BSkyB.
Football authorities claimed a sui generis database right in FDC’s Football Live database, which it said cost £600,000 per season to run. This is operated by sending analysts to every fixture, who then phone-in the relevant match information to a central hub as it occurs.
The Court of Appeal yesterday upheld Football Dataco’s claims that Sportradar’s “Live Scores” service, based on information gleaned by operators monitoring sources such as live broadcasts of games or Sky’s Soccer Saturday, and provided to Stan James until the button was removed from the operator’s website last March ahead of trial, breached its sui generis database right.
Sir Jacob also ruled that UK punters were extracting a substantial part of the database when they used the “pop up” facility on Stan James website, even after Sportradar and Stan James drastically restricted the amount of information being provided on lower-league games to just goals and timings, in an apparent attempt to strengthen their legal position.
The Court of Appeal found Stan James and Sportradar to be joint tortfeasors (wrongdoers) with the UK punters.
An important blow in favour of Football Dataco and against Stan James and Sportradar in the case was struck by the ECJ last October, when Europe’s highest court ruled that UK courts had jurisdiction over overseas parties in respect of allegations of primary infiringement of sui generis right, when these parties were directly targeting members of the UK public. Swiss-based Sportradar was forced to concede that it had this intention.
The High Court had ruled earlier that year in May that Sportradar was not jointly liable with customers of Gibraltar-based Stan James and bet365 for infringing FCD’s database right, as it was making the information available from its servers in Austria, and therefore lay outside of its jurisdiction.
This week’s Appeal Court ruling effectively reverses that earlier decision.
UK football authorities’ claim of copyright and a licence fee from media and betting companies for reproducing English and Scottish football fixture lists was however thrown out by the ECJ last March. Football Dataco had initiated legal action against parties including Stan James, Enetpulse and Yahoo! after they refused to pay fees for those alleged rights.
Article written by Stephen Carter
