Fantasy Leagues

The fantasy sports business is a billion-dollar success story and provides entertainment to millions of sport fans worldwide. There are fantasy leagues for nearly every sport. The leagues contain different numbers of individuals who select actual players in that specific sport to be on their “team.” While there are many different rules and alignments within fantasy sports leagues, the basics come down to this: a team earns, or loses, points based on its players' actual statistics.

Numerous television sport shows cover fantasy league drafts and management, and the phenomenon has also resulted in a television series based on the lives of adult men involved in the same fantasy football league. Television sport shows have even led to the development of a new type of on-air personality—the fantasy sports guru. These gurus offer their opinions on who to start and who to bench for any given week during the fantasy league season.

While the fantasy leagues may be responsible for creating new television genres and sports shows, the phenomenon has been so popular that it has even led to people losing their jobs. In December 2009, four employees of Fidelity Investments were fired for playing fantasy football while on company time and using company equipment. The company strictly enforced an antigambling prohibition that included the area of fantasy sports.

Although the conversation involving fantasy leagues is usually about wins and losses, a critical issue that has arisen over the past few years surrounds licensing rights and professional athletes' rights to their names and statistics. In cases involving CBS Interactive and CBC Distribution and Marketing, the courts held that the First Amendment right of the fantasy league producers to use players' names and their public statistics took precedence over the players' rights and, thus, protected the fantasy leagues' unauthorized use for profit. While the fantasy league developers succeeded in the aforementioned cases, this issue is likely to keep resurfacing, especially when the popularity of fantasy leagues increases every year and the amount of money involved increases as well.