sam Litigation Against Sportingbet Filed By U.s. Company

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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From: http://www.gamblingpress.com/archive/2007/07/1153.htm