Free for a Fee

Seyfarth Shaw

October 7th, 2015

Marcus Mintz

On October 5, 2015, the nascent industry was rocked when the New York Times reported that an employee of Draft Kings, the current market leader, used proprietary information regarding player usage in Draft Kings’ contests to win $350,000 in a contest hosted by competitor Fan Duel.  The industry, and Draft Kings in particular, have since come under a flood of criticism for a lack of internal controls and running a rigged game.

The information that was allegedly misused by the Draft Kings employee is player usage data — the percentages that particular players are “drafted” by contest participants.  This information is neither public nor available by any lawful means until changes to a participant’s line-up are “locked” and cannot be changed.  By having this information prior to being “locked” in, a DFS participant would get an unfair advantage by being able to calculate a line-up around the players that are owned by existing participants and thus may have a statistically higher change of winning certain large-format contests where a unique line-up makes the chances of winning much greater.

more

The content in this post was found at http://www.tradesecretslaw.com/2015/10/articles/trade-secrets/daily-trade-secret-theft-for-daily-fantasy-sports/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TradingSecrets+%28Trading+Secrets%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.