Protection of Data Rights of Sports Event Organizers in the Era of Digital Sports

In the era of digital sports, the commercial value of event data is becoming more and more prominent. Using a combination of literature and comparative studies, the paper analyzes the difficulties that event organizers are facing on data rights protection and proposes appropriate protection strategies. Event organizers pay significant effort to form and present event data, and the data rights of event organizers should be fairly protected. However, the protection of contract law, intellectual property law and anti-unfair competition law under the existing legal framework are somehow different from the protection of data rights of event organizers, and it is difficult to provide effective legal support. Moreover, the public nature and individual rights of event data make it inappropriate to set up absolute and exclusive property rights for event organizers ' data, but rather to create limited exclusive“quasi-property rights”. On one hand, it enables event organizers to fight against specific types of subjects and behaviors, on the other hand, it realizes the coordination between the protection of data rights of event organizers and the rights of individual data such as data freedom and athletes ' data rights. In China, following the market orientation of the current revision of the sports law, we can take the opportunity of the revision to introduce a “quasi-property right” clause for event organizers ' data, and thus properly arrange the related interests, which might be a feasible solution.