Are baseball statistics proprietary information of Major League Baseball or are they part of a historical record? The courts are about to figure that out:

In a lawsuit that could affect the pastime of an estimated 16 million people, CBC Distribution and Marketing wants the judge to stop Major League Baseball from requiring a license to use the statistics.

The company claims baseball statistics become historical facts as soon as the game is over, so it shouldn't have to pay for the right to use them.

Working mostly over the Internet, CBC and its hundreds of competitors provide player profiles and process reams of daily data for fans who pretend to be team owners, drafting players for imaginary squads and using statistics to determine a winner at the season's end.

While some leagues are just for fun, others award large cash prizes, and operating them has become a multimillion industry.

CBC, which has run the CDM Fantasy Sports leagues since 1992, sued baseball last year after it took over the rights to the statistics and profiles from the Major League Baseball Players Association and declined to grant the company a new license.

Before the shift, CBC had been paying the players' association 9 percent of gross royalties. But in January 2005, Major League Baseball announced a $50 million agreement with the players' association giving baseball exclusive rights to license statistics.

Daniel Drezner thinks the MLB is being monumentally stupid.

It honestly hadn't occured to me that royalties had to be paid for fantasy leagues, though I guess everything changes as companies start profiting off of it. After all, video games have to license stats from leagues to use in their games. By extention, so should fantasy leagues. And I guess it does make sense that the players ought to be compensated if their personas are used by a third party to make profit (and if they've sold their rights to MLB, then MLB would have them).

At the same time, I find the idea that Major League Baseball could shut down every fantasy league except its own to be particularly odious. Baseball is a public spot. I find the idea that something so ubiquitous can be commodified down to the last drop difficult to wrap my hands around. Should newspapers have to pay money to be able to report on games, and run standings and statistics? More importantly, could they withhold the right of a newspaper to publish statistics if they run columns critical of the industry? If we consider statistics to be intellectual property, it would seem so.

It sounds like it could be a complicated issue.