Recently, SportsBusiness Daily reported that CBS Interactive Inc. filed suit against the NFL Players Association regarding the union’s incessant demands for payment arising from the use of player names in fantasy football games.

The only problem?  A legal battle concluded earlier this year stands for the proposition that player names and statistics are in the public domain.

“Despite the clarity of the law on this issue, and despite its arguments having been fully considered in the recent litigation, the Players Association continues to make objectively baseless demands for licensing fees from CBS Interactive and others in the fantasy football industry,” the lawsuit, filed earlier in the week, asserts.

The NFLPA also has allegedly threatened CBS that, if a challenge to the union’s right to licensing fees, the NFLPA will refuse to grant CBS the rights necessary to operate fantasy football games.  As a result, CBS has also included a claim for antitrust violations.

The dispute is fairly straightforward — CBS believes that a lawsuit arising in connection with major league baseball controls the situation.  Earlier in the year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a ruling that the player names and statistics are not subject to licensing fees.

In this case, CBS took the initiative, filing suit in the same Circuit from which the baseball decision initiated.  If CBS had waited, the NFLPA could have filed suit in a different jurisdiction, where the baseball ruling would not have constituted binding legal precedent.

The fact that the Supreme Court declined to hear the issue doesn’t mean that the law is fully and clearly resolved.  Typically, the Supreme Court only agrees to hear cases that involve issues on which various U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal have disagreed, or where the Circuit in a given case has blatantly failed to apply existing law properly.

In this case, then, the NFLPA really should have taken the initiative and filed suit in a potentially friendly court.  As it now stands, the NFLPA likely will initially attack the present lawsuit by arguing that it should not have been filed in federal court in Minnesota.