The court observed that the information used by Striker, which is player name and data of a player’s real-word match performance, is freely available in the public domain and can be used by anyone.
“It is not the plaintiffs’ case that the defendants are using any personal information such as the height and weight of the players, which is not in the public domain,” the order read.
“The information which is available in public domain cannot be owned by anybody, including the players themselves. Therefore, such publicly available information cannot be the subject matter of an exclusive licence by the player in favour of a third party,” it added.
The single-judge bench of Justice Amit Bansal, while refusing an interim injunction, listed the matter before the Delhi High Court’s joint-registrar for completion of the pleadings on July 10.
Rario had filed a plea against Striker and MPL back in February alleging that Striker’s player art and identifiers, including player names, through which Striker offers digital player cards, infringed on the personality rights for which it has acquired exclusive licences from almost 170 cricketers.
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Rario claimed that it paid Rs 148.32 crore in the last one year alone to procure such exclusive licences and authorisations. Rario’s plea was joined by cricketers like Harshal Patel, Shivam Dube and Umran Malik, who are among several other big ticket cricket players who have signed NFT deals with the company.
Meanwhile, Striker was joined in its petition by All India Gaming Federation (AIGF) and real-money gaming company Winzo. In its intervention, AIGF had said that “not being able to use specific identifiers for players could impact growth of smaller companies”.
“The case set up by the plaintiffs (Rario) is on a misconception that an entity requires consent/authorisation of an individual sportsperson in order to use facts, information, images and other materials necessary to identify those players to enable the playing of games on OFS (online fantasy sports) platforms,” the 51-page Delhi High Court order read.
The court also noted that NFTs did not belong to any platform, and the platforms involved in the lawsuit were just enablers of NFTs.
Nitesh Jain, cofounder of Striker said, “We are tremendously grateful to the Delhi High Court for establishing that there can be no monopoly over NFT technology. Indie game developers like Striker can’t survive in a world where NFT tech is monopolised by a few”.
“This protects the rights of both indie developers who cannot afford expensive licenses, and the artist community that we work with to use this revolutionising new tech (NFT) to make art out of public information and images. Using blockchain and NFT technologies also allows us, among other things, to keep our systems free of fraud and foster transparency,” he added.