Swish Analytics’ data scraping lawsuit against OddsJam will proceed after the judge sided with the sports company over all five of its claims.
Swish Analytics’ data scraping lawsuit against OddsJam will proceed after the judge sided with the sports analytics company over all five of its claims.
The case, filed in California Superior Court last December, saw Swish allege that OddsJam used its proprietary odds calculations without permission and republished them for commercial purposes.
OddsJam’s business model is to aggregate odds calculations from a variety of providers and sources – including Swish – which it then charges users for.
It is similar contextually, albeit on a much smaller scale, to the lawsuit Reddit recently filed against several data scraping start-ups, for the alleged unlawful scraping of proprietary data to train AI systems.
OddsJam, as of this year owned by US-listed affiliate Gambling.com Group, had attempted to convince the court to chuck the claims on legal grounds, including failure to state a claim, but the judge opted to keep all five causes of action in place in the latest ruling.
These included misappropriation, “hot news” misappropriation, unjust enrichment, unfair competition claims and intentional interference.
This means the case will proceed to the next stage in the Californian legal process, which will see the company be required to provide an answer to Swish’s complaint ahead of discovery and a potential trial.
Judge rules ‘hot news’ legal theory still exists
Hot news misappropriation is a legal doctrine that aims to protect time sensitive information from being unfairly copied by a competitor; it forms a central part of Swish’s case.
While OddsJam had attempted to argue the tort no longer existed in California due to it being superseded by federal and state copyright laws, the judge in the end ruled the Golden State did indeed recognise it.
Judge Christine Van Aken wrote: “The court therefore concludes the torts of hot news misappropriation and common law misappropriation exist in California unless they have been superseded by statute.”
‘Hot news’ cases are over 100 years old, the legal theory having been established in the 1918 Supreme Court case INS v. AP, but have become less frequent since the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act.
Meanwhile, the court also ruled neither the federal Copyright Act nor California’s trade secrets statute pre-empted Swish’s claims and that the business adequately stated every cause of action.