Yahoo Sues the NFL Players Association

Yahoo has taken the NFL Players Association, which is the National Football League players' union, to court on the grounds that it shouldn't have to pay for player data such as names, statistics or photos it uses in its online fantasy football league game as all the information is already public.

Yahoo claims, in the complaint filed on Monday at the US District Court for Minnesota, that the NFL Players Association has threatened to sue if the Internet giant doesn't pay royalties for the data. Yahoo has had previous agreements with the player group but those ended on March 1 and it hasn't renewed them.

Yahoo decided not to pay and believes it doesn't need the group's permission to use the information based on a similar case won by CBS Interactive. In April CBS won a case against the same player group with the court deciding that the network wasn't obligated to pay license fees for the statistics because all the information was already available in the public domain. The NFL Players Association has appealed the decision though.

The case follows a similar one last year in which the Major League Baseball's Internet department followed by the pro-baseball players’ union sued CBC Distribution and Marketing, a company that sells fantasy sports-related items online or through other means, claiming that the firm used the players' name and information without a license, supposedly violating the players' privacy rights. MLB lost the case and subsequent appeal and the court ruled that the company's "first amendment rights in offering its fantasy baseball products supersede the players' rights of publicity."

In this latest case Yahoo wants the court to prevent the union from taking any further action against it and to rule that the fantasy football game wasn't in violation of any of the players' rights to privacy.