Betting chains face new limits on use of data

Thursday, June 10, 2004 | 11:13 a.m.

BLOOMBERG NEWS

LONDON -- William Hill Plc, the U.K.'s second-largest betting chain, and competitors in Greece, Sweden and Finland are violating European Union law when they use data on horse racing and other sports events without permission, an aide at Europe's highest court said.

A unit of London-based William Hill infringed the rights of the British Horseracing Board when it used unlicensed data on its Web site after obtaining it from newspapers and broadcasters, Christine Stix-Hackl, an aide at the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, said in a news release.

Bookmakers can't re-use information "even if they don't obtain the data directly from the database but from other independent sources such as print media or the Internet," Stix-Hackl said.

The aide, whose opinions are followed by the court in about 85 percent of cases, also found in a related case that companies from Greece, Sweden and Finland illegally used schedules for top English and Scottish football leagues developed by Fixtures Marketing Ltd. The high court's decisions will help shape the level of protection for databases and affect companies that sell data obtained through freely available information, lawyers said.

The cases stem from a dispute over the EU's 1996 database directive, which was meant to harmonize a hodge-podge of national rules. It prevents the unauthorized use of a database for 15 years if companies can show they invested in gathering and presenting the information.

The British Horseracing Board, the governing authority for the U.K. horse racing industry, maintains a database on hundreds of races and spends about 6 million euros ($7.4 million) a year tracking race schedules and the names of horses and riders.