No copyright for soccer matches

By the judgement on March 1st 2012, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ordained that there is no copyright on the soccer championship matches schedules which will be available for use without restraint by anyone and particulary by bookmakers. The cause had been promoted by Dataco, which manages the rights concerning the soccer schedules in Great Britain, against Yahoo! and some bookmakers in order to exercise its right on the exclusive use of the schedules. As a first step, the english High Court had stated that the choice of date and time of the various matches was to be considered as a creative act and therefore protectable according to the copyright law. The Court of Justice, however, has denied that such an activity could be considered sufficiently original so as to benefit from the copyright law, stating instead that in order to protect any database and its content, the prerequisite of “originality” must subsist, which is absent in this specific case. The verdict, beyond being interesting under the juridical point of view, will have an important impact especially on the bets on the soccer matches. The license system recently adopted by the Bundesliga will need to be reviewed, since at the current state it won’t allow who uses the matches schedules to pay the royalties.