Litigation filed against British online company alleging copyright infringement
Tuesday 31st July 2007
Fantasy games company RotoPlay Inc has announced that it has filed suit against the British online gambling company Sportingbet alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition.
The case relates to two of RotoPlay’s sports lottery games, Football Lottery and Baseball Lottery, as it alleges that Sportingbet copied them and is offering them on its family of sites as original games.
The games from the Pennsylvania company require fantasy sports players to use their skill in selecting which six athletes from a list of 54 will score the most fantasy points that week. Points are then tallied based on those athletes’ actual performances in a sporting event. The games also feature a prize pool for correctly selecting four, five or all six of the top performers.
'Sportingbet copied all of our lottery games, unique scoring system, game rules, HTML code and tie-breaker information verbatim,' said Korey Gardner, President of RotoPlay. 'It’s very shocking and disappointing to see a billion-dollar, publicly-traded company such as Sportingbet so blatantly and wilfully steal our games. What is most puzzling to us is that Sportingbet decided to steal the games even after talking with us for months about licensing our games and using them legally.'
Fantasy games company RotoPlay Inc has announced that it has filed suit against the British online gambling company Sportingbet alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition.