Info Providers Win Right to Sell NBA Scores

Motorola Inc., America Online Inc. and other information providers have the right to sell real-time game scores and statistics of National Basketball Assn. games and other sports events, a federal appeals court ruled.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower-court ruling that would have blocked Motorola from providing its NBA Sports Trax Service, which distributes live game scores and other information over pagers.

The NBA contended that other parties’ real-time distribution of the information without permission violates the NBA’s copyrights and hurts the league’s own efforts to exploit the value of its property.

The lower court had found that although Motorola and Stats--the company that provides the sports information for Motorola’s paging service--had not committed copyright infringement, they had misappropriated the NBA’s property rights.

The ruling could have far-reaching implications for Internet, broadcast and other media companies that seek to sell data on events as they happen, legal experts said. It appears to give traditional media outlets as well as new electronic information services broad latitude to distribute scores or facts without violating the rights of companies hosting the events, lawyers said.

“Once the facts are in the public domain, they are public. They are not private property,” said Andrew Deutsch, an attorney for Sports Team Analysis & Tracking Systems Inc., a Schaumburg, Ill.-based company that compiled the scores for both Motorola and AOL. “Companies have a right to bring them to the public as rapidly as possible.”

Jeffrey Mishkin, the NBA’s chief legal officer, said the league plans to appeal the appellate court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. “While we’re disappointed by today’s decision, it is just one stage in a long battle that we ultimately expect to win,” he said in a statement.

Although the case didn’t directly involve AOL, the appeals court said in a 37-page ruling that AOL enjoys the same rights as Motorola to disseminate sports statistics online. The NBA has filed a similar lawsuit against AOL. Stats was a co-defendant in both lawsuits.

The court ruling didn’t diminish the rights of television stations to broadcast copyrighted games and events for which they pay royalties. For example, Internet firms still can’t retransmit moving video of an entire game. But the decision does protect media providers from lawsuits involving transmission of basic facts and numbers, such as scores and time remaining in the game, lawyers said. It remains unclear what level of detail on a play-by-play account might be protected under copyright law.

Several media companies had filed briefs supporting Motorola in the case.

Meanwhile, the National Football League had filed briefs siding with the NBA.