Fantasy Sports Aren't Safe Yet

As a nervous nation awaits its first full day of desperately searching the ticker for Marc Bulger's yardage and Sebastian Janikowski's field goal total, there's movement on the fight between sports league and fantasy sports providers. As Eric Fisher of the SportsBusiness Journal reports, CBS and the NFL Players Association are going to court in a battle over pressure to pay big licensing fees.

The Supreme Court of the United States rejected hearing MLB's appeal last spring in which baseball argued statistics were not fair use under intellectual property law. Basically, the highest court in the land has said sports leagues can't block fantasy sports. The NFLPA's Andy Feffer disagrees.

"We feel very strongly we retain intellectual property rights in this area even after what happened at the Supreme Court. I'm certain that anyone really looking at the category doesn't believe or think that [CDM] is the law of the land or that this is completely closed."

Really, no one thinks that, except MLB (now), CBS, just about every journalist who wrote about the decision, most legal experts which get quoted in stories on the legality of fantasy sports. Yes, the SCOTUS refusing to hear baseball's case that stats constitute fair use and thus are not subject to licensing fees clearly means that with regard to the NFL, stats are not fair use and fantasy sports providers are subject to licensing fees.

For the most popular sport in America, the NFL sure does like to insult its fans an awful lot.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.