Legal Issues

Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick




MLB Online Hit With Patent Suit

from the live-by-the-sword dept

Not sure what the deal is today with companies who have been using bizarre interpretations of intellectual property to their advantage suddenly getting hit with intellectual property lawsuits. First, we had the RIAA get sued for patent infringement and now MLB Online is getting sued for patent infringement over some patents concerning the real-time display of game information online. Not surprisingly, it's a small patent hoarding company rather than a company that is actually doing any innovating. Of course, MLB.com doesn't exactly have a sparkling record when it comes to intellectual property freedom. You may recall that they wanted to stop all other sites from reporting in-game data (facts) because they seemed to believe they owned all the rights to in-game data. Of course, you can't copyright facts. Once again, though, this lawsuit is unlikely to make MLB.com realize some of the problems with the way intellectual property is dealt with these days.

Leave a Comment..

 
 

Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie
  • Plain Text: A CRLF will be replaced by break <br> tag, all other allowable HTML is intact
  • HTML: No formatting of any kind is done without explicitly being written in
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>

Search Techdirt
And now, a word from our Sponsors..



Subscribe to Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Related Stories
Close
E-mail It