“Daily Fantasy Sports contests are as legal now as they have been for the past seven years that New Yorkers have been playing them”.
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In December, a lower court granted an injunction request by Schneiderman to force the companies to stop operating while the lawsuit continued.
Joshua Schiller, an attorney for DraftKings, said his client and competitor FanDuel will remain open for business until a full decision from Manhattan’s Appellate Division, likely next fall.
“We are pleased with the Court’s ruling today”, DraftKings lawyer David Boies said in a statement.
A spokesman for the AG did not immediately comment.
An appellate panel of New York State’s Supreme Court granted a permanent injunction against the efforts of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, who has worked to declare daily fantasy sports as illegal in New York.
Massachusetts’ attorney general on Monday said it would hold a public hearing regarding its proposed consumer protection regulations for daily fantasy sports contest operators in that state on Tuesday. The court’s action halts a lower court decision earlier that would have ended the companies’ business dealings in the state.
While the fantasy sites said they raked in $200 million from New York-based players, the fantasy sites collect a percentage of the bets while the players compete for the rest of the pot.
The sites argue that their games are contests of skill, in which players act as de facto general managers and select teams that don’t exist in real life.
The lawsuit also asks that the two companies provide an accounting of the money they collected from New York-based consumers.
Schneiderman first filed suit against FanDuel and DraftKings in November, seeking to have them shut down in NY as a civil trial moves ahead.
Boies added that DraftKings will argue on appeal that daily fantasy sports contests “require just as much skill as season-long contests”. DraftKings let New Yorkers play throughout the fight with the attorney general.
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For his part, Schneiderman argued to the Appellate Division that daily fantasy sports are “merely a new manifestation of a type of activity that has always been considered gambling”.
