By Simon Zekaria - 29th March 2004
The British Horseracing Board is claiming on Tuesday in the EU courts that British sports bookmaker William Hill unlawfully used its internet database to facilitate its gambling operations.
The hearing at the European Court of Justice, Europe’s highest court, saw the horseracing governing body claim an infringement of its rights according to EU data protection laws from 1996 - transposed into UK legislation two years later.
BHB’s database holds information on race meetings across the United Kingdom; containing a large amount of information accumulated over many years supplied by horse owners, trainers, horse race organisers and others involved in the racing industry.
The information includes data on the pedigrees of some one million horses, the identity and performance of owners, trainers and jockeys and the jockeys’ racing colours.
It also contains ‘pre race information’ such as the name, place and date of the race concerned, the distance over which the race is to be run, the criteria for eligibility to enter the race, the date by which entries must be received, the entry fee payable and the prize money for the race.
Whilst the database is a pure information tool for those directly involved in horse racing, including television broadcasters, bookmakers and their customers, the BHB contend that William Hill ripped and transposed the data directly onto their own internet gambling sites, for use by their on-line clients.
Under EU law “the repeated and systematic extraction and/or re-utilisation of insubstantial parts of the contents of the database […] which unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the maker of the database shall not be permitted".
The face-off between the BHB and William Hill is not the only legal hearing at the Luxembourg-based court covering EU database protection laws.
In a second separate but related hearing at the ECJ, UK company Fixtures Marketing, which owns a database containing the fixtures for all the football matches played in the English football leagues, also seeks legal redress for breach of information property rights.
Both cases come to the EU as questions posed by courts in the UK justice system.
After the legal hearings are completed, a senior judge will give a non-binding opinion on the cases before a final judgment.
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