If I create and organize a directory of information, even public information, the directory itself, the way I structure and present information is protected. That is to say that if I go to the expense of accumulating and organizing information I can prevent other people from taking my work and presenting it as their own. This is why direct mail firms, and other organizations, seed lists with "false" information. Warren Publishing v. Microdos Data Corporation 11th Circuit 94-8474.

But more to the point in this case is an issue of privacy, of ownership of a persons representation and identity. A person, such as an actor or athelete, has the exclusive right to profit from his likeness. This and many others are the reason I cannot use the image of Andrew Cohen to endorse my products.

When it comes to a player, certainly his picture and name used in a commercial package as a key element of that package is such a use, and the player has the right to license that image. This the ball players do. Collectively for $10 million per year they sell their likeness to MLB. This is not an exclusive right, players can sell their likeness to Nike or Addidas for the specific use in selling shoes.

But their likeness is not just a photo (or even a drawing) and a name. The image of a baseball player can be considered his cumulative record, the statistics that allow someone else to create a model of that player. Now, if someone uses a model image of a player and sells that likeness to others for profit without compensating the owner, the player or the licensee, then yes I guess some law has been violated.

So, the issue here is more than the publication of statistics or their analysis in forecasting a team's performance. It is creating a model of a player and selling it for profit without compensating the player. The player has been robbed, literally, of his identity.

The issue here is NOT more than the publication of statistics. That is ALL it is.

We do not create a "model" of a player in Fantasy Baseball, or Fantasy Football, or any of the other fantasy games out there. All that happens is we take the statistics the players put up in real games, which are the same statistics published in the box scores of every local newspaper, and add those statistics to the rest of the statistics of our fantasy team.

No one is selling those statistics for profit. They are selling the service of compiling the statistics. We fantasy players could just take the newspaper and get all the statistics we need from the box scores, and re-sort those statistics according to which fantasy teams the players are on. In fact, back in the mid-80's, we used the statistics that were published weekly in the USA Today to do just that. But it is a tedious, time-consuming effort during which multiple mistakes could be made. Stat services sprang up to respond to this need of making the record-keeping more painless. They re-sort the statistics for us and give us the rankings of each of our teams based on those statistics.

If that's stealing a player's identity then every time a newspaper publishes a box score it's stealing the player's identity.