Stealing Signs: Could Baseball's Common Practice Lead to Liability for Corporate Espionage?
2018; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1556-5068
Autores Tópico(s)Legal Systems and Judicial Processes
ResumoMajor League Baseball (MLB) teams, like companies, rely on secrets to maintain their competitive advantage over rivals. In baseball, these secrets (signs) communicate what pitch to throw, when to steal, and when to bunt. MLB teams that steal their opponent’s signs eliminate their opponent’s advantage and gain an advantage by adjusting their strategy accordingly. Throughout baseball’s history, including the 1948 Cleveland Indians' historic regular season comeback and the infamous Red Sox Apple Watch scandal in 2017, sign stealing has led to wins, historic home runs, and ultimately increased revenues for teams. This paper applies the U.S. theft-of-trade secrets framework to sign stealing in baseball. It begins with the premise that baseball signs are very similar to corporate trade secrets. It then imagines a trade-secrets case against a sign-stealing MLB team or player and asks whether a team or the Department of Justice (DOJ) could -- in theory -- win such a case. Ultimately, it argues that the DOJ, but not a team, could win such a case because a court could find that (i) baseball signs fall within the Economic Espionage Act of 1996’s (EEA) broad definition of “trade secrets” and (ii) sign stealing falls within the EEA’s broad ban on “theft of trade secrets.” The paper concludes by advancing a reverse engineering counterargument and outlining four policy reasons against DOJ bringing such a case.
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