I ran across an interesting story from one of my favorite sports blogs, Deadspin, about MLB suing a company for using official statistics in their fantasy leagues. The story appeared in yesterday’s USA Today. You can also access the text of the story here.

Basically, MLB contends that the statistics that players produce belong to MLB and they have a right to charge licensing fees to anyone who wants to use them to make money. The attorney for CBC, the company that MLB is suing, contends that player statistics are common knowledge. From the article:

…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 website because it automatically process statistics for them, so the company essentially conveys public information

In a previous post, I about how the Sabermetric movement can be seen as a reappropration of a cultural product in a way that is more useful to the consumer of the cultural product. This would seem to be the case here. However, MLB actually does provide the cultural product of fantasy baseball to fans. The major fantasy outlets, such as Yahoo or ESPN pay lots of money to MLB for the rights to use players’ names and statistics in their leagues.

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