I ran into this over at Waiting For Stanley...
Apparently the NHLPA came down on thecommonfan.com, a site running free hockey pools, and insitgated it's closure. According to the NHLPA:
"The use of player's names, images and other identifying characteristics in any manner that is commercially exploited requires a license. Using player's names in a fantasy pool is such an instance. Our standard fantasy licensing contract will require both a minimum guarantee and a royalty (the royalty being a percentage of advertising revenue brought in by the fantasy site as well as a set fee per unique user). Royalties are credited against the minimum guarantee; if you earn over the minimum guarantee you pay those royalties to the NHLPA, if you earn under the minimum guarantee you would just be liable for the minimum guarantee."
The problem is, this isn't entirely true. License fees for players names and stats has been a contentious legal issue since Fantasy Baseball and Football blew up in the States. It eventually culminated in a lawsuit between CDM Sports, an internet pool provider, and the MLB. The MLB claimed the right to impose license fees on any and all fantasy league providers employing player's names and stats for their games. CDM (and the Fantasy Sport Association) rejected that claim, citing the fact that stats have been regularly printed in newspapers for decades as part of "public domain".
And, guess what? MLB lost.
Fantasy baseball leagues are allowed to use player names and statistics without licensing agreements because they are not the intellectual property of Major League Baseball, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
Baseball and its players have no right to prevent the use of names and playing records, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Ann Medler in St. Louis ruled in a 49-page summary judgment.
Judge Medler's ruling was "no surprise at all," says CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. "We are talking about facts — objective facts that people can see and log for themselves. No one has a proprietary right to those sorts of facts. It's like someone saying they have exclusive rights to reporting the temperature, or the weather, or the time of day. That's why baseball lost."
I'm no lawyer, but am somewhat familiar with the ruling. Not everything falls under the purview of "public domain". For example, using a players name in relation to his stats line requires no licensing fee. Using a players name to explicitly promote your product does. So, based on this precedent, I don't have to pay the NHLPA if I want to use Iginla's results this season to run a pool. I do, however, have to pay a fee to if I plaster his likeness on my pool's page and say "Jarome says this Pool is the Bee's Knees!"
I know there are some lawyers out there in the blogosphere, so if any are visiting, feel free to correct me if Im wrong. However, if I was The Common Fan, I would run my free pools and tell the NHLPA to shove it.
