{"title":"Governing Esports: Public Policy, Regulation and the Law","authors":"E. Windholz","doi":"10.53300/001C.13241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53300/001C.13241","url":null,"abstract":"Esport is an enigma – at once a sport; technological innovation; and profit maximizing business. As a sport, it has much in common with traditional sports. It has leagues and franchises, teams and skilled players, competitions, sponsors, broadcasters and, at the elite level, significant prize money and all the risks that come with it. As a technological innovation, it has created new markets and value networks outside the control of sports’ traditional hegemony. And while many sports today generate significant revenues, esports differ because of the primacy of its profit motive. Unlike traditional sports, it does not see itself as the custodian of artefacts of great socio-cultural importance. This gives rise to a plethora of governance, policy, regulatory and legal issues. This article examines these issues through the lens of regulatory scholarship. Regulatory scholarship provides a valuable framework for examining why governments regulate in the form in which they regulate. Regulatory theory looks behind governments’ stated public interest purposes to examine the impact private interests, institutional parameters, and ideational currents have on the regulatory endeavour. Regulatory scholarship enables us to look beyond traditional doctrinal law to debate the many complex issues and multiple perspectives inherent in the phenomena that is esports.","PeriodicalId":302064,"journal":{"name":"Sports Law eJournal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124294564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Doping in Sport - Should it be a Crime?","authors":"Tomas W Fitzgerald","doi":"10.53300/001c.6477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53300/001c.6477","url":null,"abstract":"In 2010 the National Rugby League discovered that the Melbourne Storm Rugby League club, had engaged in systematic breaches of the salary cap rules. Across 5 years the club paid players in various ways without disclosing those payments as required under the NRL’s rules. Additionally, those payments were covered up by doctored bookkeeping, and in some cases false statutory declarations about compliance with salary cap rules. In 2013 the Essendon Football Club was investigated by the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority for its now notorious supplements program. That program involved the administration of purportedly performance enhancing substances to members of the playing group. The practice was widespread, systematic and involved non-compliance with ordinary record keeping practices, presumably to obscure which substances were taken when and by whom. Both of these are examples of systematic, deliberate cheating in sport, calculated to gain advantage over rivals. Both were punished severely by the administrators of the respective sporting codes. Yet despite these similarities, only the Essendon supplements scandal has been accompanied by serious and persistent calls for criminalization of the behavior underlying the cheating.","PeriodicalId":302064,"journal":{"name":"Sports Law eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129437011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}