Licensing baseball sites? It's just an MLB fantasy

You might have seen the headlines again this week: Major League Baseball is arguing that online fantasy baseball sites must pay license fees to MLB to compensate players for the use of their names.

For anybody concerned about this, this isn't a new case. It's an appeal from a 2006 ruling by a lower court. MLB lost that one, and they're probably going to lose this one too. According to the Associated Press story:

MLB's lawyer Virginia Seitz said online fantasy games exploit players by effectively turning them into game pieces and using their names to draw more customers. "There's no way of escaping the fact that players' names are on the product," Seitz said.

Countering that argument is CBC Distribution and Marketing Inc., which argues that these names are of baseball players who are public figures whose statistics have been in the public eye for more than a century.

[CBC attorney Rudy] Telscher said fantasy leagues were not unlike newspapers, which use sports players' names in their pages to draw readers. He said customers paid to use CBC's Web site because it automatically process statistics for them, so the company essentially conveys public information. "There's not any affidavit from players who say they feel like they have been damaged" by fantasy leagues, Telscher said.

That's why CBC won the first round and is likely to win this appeal. After all, I use the players' names and statistics on this site every day. Is Bud Selig going to send me a bill?

Of course not. But that's the slippery slope that we're treading toward if the judges rule that names and stats need to be licensed.

There's big money in fantasy baseball ($1.5 billion a year, according to the AP story), and MLB is trying to create a new revenue stream. It's true that the big companies such as Yahoo!, ESPN and Sportsline are paying licensing fees for their fantasy baseball content, but they're also getting added content such as live scoring and gamecasts. Other areas of their sites receive additional traffic because people come there for that fantasy content. Their sites benefit from the official license, as well they should.

And baseball benefits greatly from fantasy baseball. It has stimulated interest in the game more than any development over the past two decades. MLB should remember that before they turn their lawyers loose.