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Litigation Against Sportingbet Filed By U.s. Company
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.
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