Abstract
Fantasy sports, which provide ordinary participants to experience the role of the manager and owner of their imaginary team, owe their success to the availability of performance statistics and related data of the athletes. Fantasy sports also heavily rely on the athletes and teams’ logos, images, names, likenesses, and other similar indicia. Given the inexperienced nature of the fantasy sports industry in India, the question of whether the fantasy sports operators need to enter into licensing agreements with leagues and players’ association has not been explored in depth. However, the fantasy sports market in India is fast catching up, and India is touted to become one of the largest markets for fantasy sports games by 2020. As a result, it becomes pertinent to initiate a discussion on several intricate and inconclusive intellectual property-based matters, which will have to be addressed by the Indian courts in the near future. In this light, this paper attempts to flag the potential concerns and gauge the conceivable response of the Indian intellectual property jurisprudence to these concerns. This paper argues that the Indian jurisprudence heavily favours the fantasy operators vis-à-vis the leagues and players’ associations and further demonstrates that the fantasy operators can avoid any intellectual property infringements under the Indian regime, by engaging in prudent and limited usage of intellectual property of leagues and players as permitted by the law.
Article source: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40318-020-00166-8