Two years ago, when Barry Bonds was in the throes of the BALCO investigation, a quirky thing happened in the ESPN fantasy baseball league I participate in: The league website stopped referring to “Barry Bonds”, substituting instead the nomiker “San Francisco OF.” It turns out that ESPN pays Major League Baseball a licensing fee to use the names of major league players; the league was in a dispute with Bonds, and one side or the other insisted that his name not be associated with MLB for a time.

The particulars aren’t important. What is amazing is that MLB felt like it had the right to license the player’s names, and fantasy baseball league operators like ESPN actually went along with the licensing scheme. But not all of them did - a smallish outfit in St. Louis challenged the licensing deal and won in court. MLB pushed the case all the way to the Supreme Court - which just denied cert, letting the lower court victories for fantasy baseball stand. Good news for baseball fans and advocates of sensible IP rights everywhere.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 4:39 pm by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.