Football Fixtures: Advocate General refutes intellectual property rights claim
In his opinion delivered today, Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi refuted the claims of Football Dataco, and the English and Scottish football leagues that intellectual property rights under the Database Directive subsist in the annually-created fixture lists.
Fixture lists, for each season of the leagues, set the dates and venues for every match to be played. Football Dataco et al, asserted that there is in the fixture lists a sui generis right and a copyright under the Database Directive and a copyright under UK law. It consequently initiated legal action against certain media and sports betting companies in the UK, including Yahoo! and Stan James, who had refused to pay fees for those alleged rights.
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