Today is a big day for the fantasy sports industry with a monumental court ruling on the case CBC Distributing and Marketing Inc. vs Major League Baseball Advanced Media.  This case was about whether or not MLBPA could regulate the use of players’ names and statistics to prevent a fantasy sports company from using this information without a license.  The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that

…although the players enjoyed a state-law right of publicity in their names and other personal information, their publicity rights were trumped by CBC’s First Amendment right to use this information.  The court balanced the substantial public interest and value in this information against the relatively weak right of publicity in play. CBC’s use of the information does not interfere with the players’ economic interests, their ability to earn a living from their names or their performances, which is the interest at the heart of the right of publicity; that weakened publicity interest must give way to free speech rights.

If the ruling went the other way, MLB would have been able to monopolize fantasy baseball, making it outright impossible (very expensive) for the smaller entities to compete.  It would have also paved the way for many other rulings in favor of other big sports associations such as the NFL, NBA, and NHL.