LITIGATION AGAINST SPORTINGBET FILED BY U.S. COMPANY
20 July 2007
Copyright infringement and unfair competition
claimed
The Hershey, Pennsylvania-based fantasy games company
RotoPlay, Inc.has issued international press releases
advising that it has filed suit against the British
publicly listed online gambling company Sportingbet plc.
The release reveals that Rotoplay's Houston-based legal
team, Goldstein & Faucett, has filed suit in case no.
2:05-CV-02761-JKG in Federal Court in Pennsylvania
against competitor Sportingbet, alleging copyright
infringement and unfair competition related to two of
RotoPlay’s "sports lottery" games.
The suit alleges that Sportingbet copied RotoPlay’s
lottery games and is offering the games on its family of
sites as its original games.
Since 2001, RotoPlay, Inc. has offered unique sports
contests such as "Football Lottery" and "Baseball
Lottery", the two games at issue in the lawsuit. The
popular games 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 tallied based on those athletes’ actual
performances in the sporting event. The games also
feature a prize pool for correctly selecting 4, 5 or all
6 of the top performers.
"Sportingbet copied all of our lottery games, unique
scoring system, game rules, HTML code and tie-breaker
information verbatim," claims Korey Gardner, President
of RotoPlay, Inc.
"It’s very shocking and disappointing to see a billion
dollar, publicly traded company such as Sportingbet, so
blatantly and willfully 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."
Rotoplay’s games can be accessed at www.rotoplay.com.
Rotoplay currently has on-going pro and college football
contests, as well as basketball, baseball and many other
sports.
In December 2006 iGaming Corporation of Vancouver,
Canada advised that its subsidiary IGC Entertainment
Corporation had completed the purchase of all of the
assets related to the fantasy sports website
www.rotoplay.com from RotoPlay, Inc. The effective date
of the closing was December 11, 2006.
The aggregate purchase price of this transaction was a
maximum of US$300 000, of which a portion was paid upon
closing and the remainder is subject to the purchased
assets attaining pre-determined revenue targets for the
Corporation’s fiscal quarters
which end between February, 2007 and November, 2007.
At the time, iGaming's president and CEO Christopher
Knape said: “The RotoPlay purchase represents an
opportunity to broaden our product offerings to our core
group of sports enthusiast customers. With a very
significant database of such consumers, we are
well-positioned to facilitate exciting growth for the
RotoPlay asset."
The fantasy sports industry, which is growing at a rate
of 7-10 percent annually, has approximately 15 to 18
million participants and generates more than $1.5
billion per year in North America (as reported by the
Fantasy Sports Industry Association in March,
2006). It was also specifically excluded from the
recently-passed Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement
Act.
Online Casino News courtesy of
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