Poker Website Data Row to Go to Trial

By Stephen Howard, PA

Professional poker players The Hendon Mob were keeping their cards close to their chest today after the latest round of their High Court contest with Planet Ace.

Husband and wife team Tina and Mark Napolitano tried to silence the Mob’s poker information website, claiming that much of the data had been pilfered from their Planet Ace internet site.

Mr Justice Evans-Lombe refused to order that the website, thehendonmob.com, should close down but agreed that the Napolitano’s damages claim should go to trial.

Barry Boatman, one of the Mob, said after the hearing: “They are just trying to close us down because they don’t want the competition.

“We have done everything asked of us and this ought not to be going to the courts. It is a waste of time.”

Mr Boatman, and the three other poker players who make up the successful team which has even beaten America’s finest in Las Vegas, were ordered by the same judge last November to purge their website of all the information they admitted they had copied from Planet Ace.

Christina Michalos, representing the Napolitanos who live in Spain, told the judge that the Mob’s website still contained information copied from her clients’ work.

“Planet Ace is entitled to stop people pilfering their data and benefiting commercially from that,” she said.

Brian Kennelly, speaking for the Mob in court, said: “Our website has been cleaned up and there is no surviving data from the Planet Ace website.”

He claimed the Mob’s poker information service was just a small player in the field and Planet Ace were just trying “to shut down the competition”.

Mr Justice Evans-Lombe, giving his ruling, said in 1999 the Napolitanos thought up the idea of creating a website with a database of details from the world of poker, including information about tournaments, results, players and their form and winnings together with full tables of past results going back to the 1980s.

This was launched as pokerpages.com in March 2000.

The judge said Mr Napolitano began to suspect in September last year that the Mob’s website had been constructed using information copied from his database.

He set out to trap the defendants by incorporating into his latest material deliberate errors which he claimed appeared within hours on the Mob’s website.

The judge said the Mob had admitted making mechanical sweeps of Planet Ace’s website database and using some of the information to compile their own database.

The court battle began in November last year when the defendants agreed to remove Planet Ace information from their website and make no further copies.

Planet Ace was now demanding an injunction to shut down the Mob’s website claiming it was so infected with Planet Ace material that it was incapable of effective separation.

Miss Michalos said there should at least be a “springboard” injunction lasting for up to a year to take away the Mob’s advantage gained from copying Planet Ace’s material.

Mr Justice Evans-Lombe said he had decided that the Mob did have a case to answer that their website was still benefiting from the copied material but an injunction would pose a risk that Planet Ace would derive a remedy greater than any they would win at a trial.

The Mob, who have won tournaments and prize money at the European Super Bowl, Dutch Masters Classic, French Championship, Irish Open, Austrian Open and in the US, will now have the final showdown with Planet Ace at a trial expected to begin within three months.