No Copyright Violation In Publishing Sports Fixture Lists

The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice disproves intellectual rights property claim On Dec. 15, The European Court of Justice Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi issued a landmark opinion regarding whether the publication of sports fixture lists represents an infringement of sports bodies and leagues copyright ownership claims. Mengozzi rejected the Football DataCo and the English and Scottish football leagues claims to intellectual property rights over annual fixture lists under the Database Directive. The lists in question set the dates and venues for every match to be played during every season. Football Dataco declared a sui generis right and a copyright in the fixture lists under the Database Directive and UK law. What's more, it initiated legal action against media and sports betting companies in the UK (including Yahoo! and Stan James) for refusing to pay fees for alleged rights. The case was referred for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) from the Court of Appeal (England & Wales) which had previously ruled that football fixture lists and 'runners and riders' horseracing lists do not give rise to a sui generis database right. Although Advocate Generals' opinion is not binding for the CJEU, it is usually considered in the final rulings of the court. In this case, that should happen in 2012. Mengozzi's opinion on this case reconfirms that fixture lists do not represent a copyright so he found that: the intellectual effort and skill of creating contents of the database, not the database itself, cannot be taken into consideration to assess the grant for copyright protection; “all the details for each match are identified and collected at the data creation stage – which (…) is excluded from protection under the Directive”; the intellectual output in creation the database requires not just significant skills but creativity in the selection or arrangement of the contents of the database; “in the case of a football fixture list, the database accommodates complete and autonomous items of information which do not acquire any additional significance by being entered in the database itself”. Mengozzi even declared: “I must also observe that, in the present case, the very idea of using copyright to protect football fixture lists seems peculiar, to say the least”. He confirmed that Database Directive is meant to completely harmonize copyright protection for databases across EU. Clive Hawkswood, chief executive of the trade body Remote Gaming Association, was another one to comment: “We welcome the findings of the Advocate General in this case and, in due course, we would expect both the CJEU and the British courts to adopt the same approach. Sporting bodies have attempted several times to use IP right arguments and the Database Directive to extract significant funds from media and betting organisations. We hope that this opinion and the final CJEU ruling in this case discourages them from doing so again," he said. “Substantial revenues already flow from the betting industry to professional sports, for instance through sponsorship and joint ventures, and those kinds of truly commercial relationships provide the best way ahead for the two sectors to co-operate together for their mutual benefit,” concluded Hawkswood.