DraftKings Issues Cease and Desist to Popular DFS Analytics Site SuperLobby

On February 2, Draftkings became involved in a new litigatory front outside of its infamous New York Attorney General battle: it issued a cease and desist letter to SuperLobby, a website which offers analytics tools that allow players to compare contests across the Daily Fantasy Sports industry.

SuperLobby launched in February of 2015 with the purpose of compiling data across multiple fantasy sports companies’ contests, data which is crucial to players’ understanding of the state of the game and culture. To do this, SuperLobby must scrape data from each DFS site, which it then processes and allows parallel comparison. SuperLobby allows players to evaluate each site and better optimize their strategy for winning. Search terms include entry fees, number of entries, starting and ending times, prizes, as well as how much of the entry fee goes to the site.

In the high context world of daily fantasy sports, it is common for media sites to do scrape information from sites without the latter’s express permission, without consequence. However, daily fantasy sports sites rarely fail to address this in their terms of use, most often reserving the rights to their own data but permitting the scraping anyways. Sometimes the DFS company complies--DraftKings’ largest competitor, FanDuel, supplied SuperLobby with information about its entry fees, guaranteed prize pools, and other games, for NFL season.

So far, SuperLobby may be the first to see a daily fantasy sports company react unfavorably to its data being scraped. DraftKings believes this is a violation of their terms of use, which says “conduct that would be deemed improper also includes, but is not limited to: Using automated means (including but not limited to harvesting bots, robots, parser, spiders or screen scrapers) to obtain, collect or access any information on the Website or of any User for any purpose.” In DraftKings’ cease and desist letter, the company claims “any user of the site agrees to ‘not engage in the use, copying or distributing of any of the [i]ntellectual [p]roperty other than expressly permitted’ in the [terms of use].” DraftKings clearly has the legal mandate, and it does not look like there’s much SuperLobby can do.

On February 8, SuperLobby posted the text of the cease and desist letter on Twitter, writing, “Whilst waiting to speak to our lawyers, the Cease and Desist is casually resting next to some office equipment”. In a casual act of rebellion, they have made the full text visible to social media. SuperLobby may be seeking to protest the case.