Data On Live Football Was 'Obtained' Rather Than 'Created' And Thus Could Be The Subject Of Database Rights

Dataco Limited & Others v Sportradar GmbH & Another: Football Data Co Limited & Others v Stan James Abingdon Limited & Others [2012] EWHC 1185 (Ch)

Dataco has a service called "Football Live" which was used to input live match data into a larger football database maintained by its subcontractor PA Sport UK. The data included information such as scores, penalties and player substitutions updated as matches progressed. Dataco employed football analysts to provide a running commentary and most aspects of games and that information were input into the database. Some matters were the subject of judgement by the analysts.

Sportradar companies (German parent, Swiss subsidiary) provided a service to the betting industry called "Sport Live Data" at betradar.com. For matches being televised, Sportradar entered its data manually by operators who were watching the matches. Where the matches were not being televised, Sportradar used information from various sources, including that published by PA Sport UK's licensees. Its servers were located in Germany and Austria. Stan James was a betting company which took a feed from Sportradar and enabled its customers to see the data.

The questions for decision was whether database rights subsisted in Dataco's data: if so, whether Stan James's customers were infringing: and if so whether Sportradar and Stan James were jointly liable for acts of database infringement committed by Stan James's customers.

In brief, the High Court (Floyd J) held that:

Dataco obtained information over which it had no control. It was not therefore "creating" the data (in the BHB v William Hill sense) which meant that the substantial investment made by Dataco in collecting the data constituted investment and gave rise to a database right. The fact that the data was added to a much larger database did not matter – it was a question of a qualitative rather than...