Publications

---

In a judgment handed down by the Court of Appeal on 29 March 2011, Football DataCo Limited (FDC) has succeeded in its bid to have the rights in live data tested in the UK Courts.
A Football DataCo spokesman said: "The UK Courts have rejected Sportradar's attempts to use procedural measures to frustrate efforts to prove and protect the English and Scottish leagues’ live data rights. We can now focus our attention on the real issue in this case; our contention that Sportradar copies and commercialises the leagues’ live data feed."

The judgment is a part of ongoing proceedings brought by FDC against Sportradar GmbH and Sportradar AG seeking to test its rights in a database known as "Football Live", which the English and Scottish leagues and FDC use to transmit live match data to licensees. The claim alleges that Sportradar has copied the live data feed to use on its own website www.betradar.com.

Sportradar has used a number of different tactics to attempt to get the UK courts to decline hearing the case claiming that Germany was the more appropriate jurisdiction. On both occasions before the UK High Court, Sportradar has failed in its bid to "knock out" the case from being heard by the English Court.

Lord Justice Laws from the Court of Appeal said at the hearing that Sportradar's application for UK jurisdiction to be declined "does not succeed in relation to the database claim as regards which, therefore, the action still lives in any event". The Court of Appeal also rejected an argument by Sportradar's counsel that any trial should be stayed whilst other causes of action, notably the claim for extraction and re-utilisation by Sportradar of the live data, are referred to the CJEU.

A trial date will now be set, in all likelihood during 2012, in the UK which will assess the database rights in Football Live, and whether Sportradar is liable for database right infringement. Justice Floyd, on Sportradar's first application to the High Court noted that, on the evidence before him, FDC had a good case that errors appearing on Football Live had been copied on the www.betradar.com site.

As part of its judgment, the Court of Appeal decided that, as a result of what they had heard about how Football Live was created, the sui generis database right under the Database Directive was the more appropriate right to rely upon, rather than copyright, and has therefore held that the case should proceed on the basis of sui generis database rights alone.