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Comment by tut-urut-utut | Hacker News Reader

If the only value proposition of the game, as compared to competition, is to have real team and player names and their real up-to-date stats, then it's only fair to pay properly for that business advantage.

250M per year seems fair to me. If they don't want to, I'm sure there'll be another company willing to pay that amount for their game can be called “FIFA 2022”.

AFAIK, oil companies also has to pay for the right to extract oil from the ground to the owner. Why would this case be different.

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Sounds more like extortion. EAC built this franchise from the ground up since 1993 and FIFA had nothing to do with it other than four letters.

One can argue that exactly those four letters is what made this franchise successful.

FIFA in the game name give it “official” branding, which they would never have otherwise.

and now EA is milking teenagers with builtin gambling mechanics. there's always a bigger fish and in this case I am happy to see that. Didn't FIFA also have an exclusive contract which prevented PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) from acquiring licenses for team names?

Buying exclusive rights to teams / leagues to cripple the competition is a fairly standard EA play. However it is important to note the exclusive contracts are between EA Sports and the teams / leagues, not FIFA.

The main things FIFA brings to the table for EA is the name, and the World Cup competition. EA clearly things they aren't worth as much as FIFA wants for them, hence the current wrangling.

If the deals falls through then "EA Sports FC" (or whatver it ends up being called) will still have all the teams / leagues locked up. So a theoretical FIFA game from someone else would presumably still have the same disadvantages as Pro Evo etc.

The FIFA license doesn't cover the the teams and/or player names. It only covers the words FIFA, the logo, an the "World Cup". The player names and likeness is covered by a separate license.

I am not sure player names and statistics are actually protected though. So it’s more 250m/year to get access to branding like team logos, FIFA on the box, etc.

No its 250m for FIFA and World Cup. All the leagues/teams come from individual contracts with each league and all the players from a contract with FIFPro (International Federation of Professional Footballers) which they just renewed. Basically FIFA wants a huge amount of money for the name FIFA on the box.

Football is not like NFL or NBA where you just make a single contract with the league and you get everything. Instead you have to go and make a lot of contracts all over the place. The system is just much more fragmented.

Basically EA could just not pay this money to FIFA and call the game EA Football or something and have all the same content except the FIFA name on the box and the world cup (and the national teams that come with it)

Putting FIFA on the box is clearly covered by trademark law.

I was questioning how much of protection does player statistics have. At least in the US factual information like who’s playing in which team isn’t protected by copyright or trademark.

It's not their stats that have protection, it's their likeness and names that require a license to use. Several games in the past have featured real rosters with fake names to get around this.

Likeness presumably, but fantasy football doesn’t run into a problem with player names. So while companies would get sued over names it seems like they would also likely win.

That said, graphics are at a point where player likeness is meaningful as is team jerseys. So customers would presumably prefer the licensed product.

Fantasy football is dealing in statistics. Using a persons name in your game implies they endorse your game, the players associations manage this stuff pretty closely.

> Using a persons name in your game implies they endorse your game

I am sure that argument would be made, but I don’t think customers actually think that. Especially if the game makes it clear it’s unofficial.

I think there were court cases on infringement around thirty years ago, when games were being made where they'd just license Shaq or Ken Griffey Jr and the rest of the names would be fake.

I don't think it's really been tested legally, but during the 1994 Major League Baseball strike, there were a handful of (strikebreakers') names that the players' association got replaced in games.

Player names are trademarked the same way Louis Vuitton is trademarked as a brand.

For famous players, that may even mean they can introduce brand names that otherwise would be ruled confusing. You can’t start selling Louis Vuiton bags, but Messi clothing and shoes won a legal battle against the older Massi brand (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54193973)

Trademark protects from confusion in the marketplace not all use. Pepsi can’t successfully sue CNN because someone being interviewed was drinking a soda.

That said, using the names would definitely get you sued but at 250m/year a court case could be worth it.

There must be something about the names as well too. The names used in PES were a continuous joke: https://www.theversed.com/51686/pro-evo-names-years/#.LcxSir...

Players definitely trademark their names, but fantasy football leagues don’t have a problem using their real names.

So while I suspect having the correct number on an in game jersey might run into issues simply linking team names, player names, and player statistics is just factual information.

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