Is Daily Fantasy Sports Legal? An Industry in Hot Water

Written by: sbnadmin This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2015

If you haven’t heard yet, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to the sporting world. The most infamous sports betting headlines at the moment are coming from Daily Fantasy Sports websites Draft Kings and Fan Duel at the moment.

The first big headline arose in mid-October when the state of Nevada (the gambling mecca of the United States) ruled that all daily fantasy betting sites must shutdown operation within the state. The DFS type of betting is now banned in Nevada and the two major daily fantasy betting sites were forced to leave town.

Shortly after that news broke, the NCAA announced that it would no longer run advertisements for daily fantasy betting in the wake of an alleged “insider trading” ring. Meanwhile, a class action lawsuit was also launched earlier in the month also citing potential insider trading against the two sites.

Then to officially make it the absolute worst October possible for Fan Duel, the NFLPA launched a class action suit against them led by Washington Redskins veteran wide receiver Pierre Garcon. The suit cites the misuse without permission and proper licensing of the players names.

To make things a little easier to follow, that lawsuit is very reminiscent of when current and former NCAA players sued EA Sports for the unlicensed use of their names and likeness in their video games. The settlement ended in the players’ favor and they ended up receiving a payout upwards of $40 million dollars. The EA college game series also went defunct and no longer exists.

We don’t know if the outcome will be reminiscent but the parallels between the two thus far are pretty uncanny.

The latest tidbit of news came in early-November. The Daily Fantasy Sports betting medium has now also been banned in the state of New York. State regulators, much like in Nevada and the five other states, issued a “cease and desist” to the two major DFS moguls Fan Duel and Draft Kings.

We don’t know when the next infamous headline will surface, but at the rate the DFS industry is going – we likely won’t have to wait long.

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