The British Horseracing Board won a case this month against the
bookmaker William Hill in a landmark case over database regulations
of 1997. The ruling forbids publication by William Hill on its
website of lists of runners in forthcoming horseraces.
The Board, which is the governing authority for horseracing in
Great Britain, obtained a ruling that publication by William Hill
on its betting website of lists of runners in forthcoming
horseraces without consent infringed the Board’s database
right.
The case is the first to reach a verdict in a UK court in which
the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997 have been
invoked. The Regulations protect data or other materials arranged
in a manner that involved “substantial investment in obtaining,
verifying or presenting the contents.” Basically, in Europe, if a
database is used by someone else without permission, the owner
probably has grounds for legal action against that person.
The Board’s database of racing information includes data
concerning horses, their owners, trainers, jockeys and other
information relevant to the racing industry in the UK.
The principal findings of the trial Judge, Mr Justice Laddie,
were as follows:
- BHB had invested significant time and money not only in
compiling but in verifying and presenting the data comprising the
Board’s database and the Judge declared that the database right
subsisted in the database and that William Hill is not entitled to
use data extracted from the database for the purposes of its
on-line betting sites;
- The publication of this data on William Hill's web sites
amounts to "re-utilisation" within the meaning of the Regulations
even though the information was already available to the public in
licensed publications such as The Racing Post; and
- The lists of runners published on William Hill's web sites
constitute, by themselves, a substantial part of the database
having regard to the importance of this information to those
interested in horse racing.
The Board was represented by law firm Theodore Goddard who
instructed barristers Peter Prescott QC and Lindsay Lane.
