My hat is off to the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) for finally going after sports leagues and their egregious copyright claims.

The CCIA’s complaint fingers the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC Universal, Morgan Creek, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group (USA) for deceptive trade practices, accusing them of systematically mispresenting the rights of consumers to use copyrighted material. “These warnings that we have been seeing for decades are false,” CCIA spokesperson Jake Ward told Ars Technica in a Monday interview. “They are a misrepresentation of the law and a violation of consumers’ rights.”

Exactly correct. Just because the NFL claims you can’t even come up with “accounts of the game” without their permission doesn’t mean that there’s any acutal basis for their claim in copyright law. It really is totally legal for me to tell you that the Colts beat the Bears in Super Bowl XLI by the score of 29-17, no matter what the NFL claims. Such a thing as fair use of copyrighted material exists, no matter how much certain overzealous copyright holders might wish it didn’t.

I strongly recommend reading the whole Ars Technica post above for more details on what exactly is going on here and why it matters.