Spring is in the air -- can you smell it? It's that intoxicating mix of grass, red clay, pine tar and chaw. That's right -- pitchers and catchers report in just a few hours, and no, we're not talking about a party in Key West.

Of course, one of the joys of baseball for the rabid fan is signing up with your friends for a fantasy baseball league. Right now, people are poring over rosters, scouting reports, fantasy stat publications and the like. Disciples of Bill James, AKA the "SABERmetricians," are plugging college and minor league numbers into their PECOTA prediction engines like they were Billy Beane. If all the statistical analysis going into baseball was going into social security policy, we probably wouldn't be staring down the barrel of a plan to privatize it a la Chile. Major League Baseball opened the doors to their vault of stats just today!

But a little problem has come up. Seems Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the web-arm of MLB's licensing juggernaut, has claimed that the player names on the team rosters are intellectual property that they, alone, have the right to license. And they've sold that license to CBS Sportsline, ESPN.com and Yahoo and a few others. Dozens of other fantasy league engines are being told to limit their enrollment to 5,000 users, forward their users to one of the affiliated services for a 10% royalty, or face legal action.

MLBAM admits that the actual statistics are part of the public domain, and that the players names are theirs to license because of the marketing agreement with the Major League Baseball Player's Association. And it's not like they're taking a "subpoena first, ask questions later" approach like the MPAA and RIAA. Still, all the controversy makes us want to go out and buy the latest Strat-o-Matic.