The MLBPA lost an appeal which will allow online fantasy leagues without having to pay for licensing, making statistics associated with sports leagues public domain. Just thinking about the money grab by the most evil force in American sports makes me angry. The Major League Baseball Players Association continues to be so myopic it's amazing. By making drug testing a negotiating point in Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations, sports fans can safely assume anyone who improves one year to the next is on performance enhancers. Their strike in 1994 may have raised salaries, but MLB was near the same level of popularity as the NFL at the time. Now it's not close.
CBC Distribution and Marketing, Inc. runs CDM fantasy sports, a small online fantasy company, sued MLB Advanced Media seeking to use of players' names and statistics for free. Fantasy baseball is the only reason I have more than a cursory knowledge of the stats put up this past season. If I were associated with Major League Baseball I would consider that a good thing and would attempt to promote fantasy leagues, not attempt to shut them down.
What this ruling means for fantasy players is that small fantasy sites can compete with the big boys. So if I made a free fantasy site with state of the art stat tracking, you'd want to come to my site instead of Yahoo, who charges for stat tracking. So if Yahoo notices that they're losing users to me, maybe Yahoo adds free stat tracking, so I try to top them I have to add some innovation. Capitalism lives on!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment