In October of last year, Major League Baseball tried to claim copyright over the “facts and statistics” of their sport, which would require web sites to pay licensing fees to provide fantasy baseball to fans. The courts of our great country promptly told MLB to kick rocks, and justice was upheld.

That ruling prompted CBS Sports to stop paying the NFL licensing fees for fantasy football, which has kicked off a legal battle that will undoubtedly last forever. The interesting thing about this case, is CBS is suing the NFLPA because the NFLPA threatened to sue them….. only in America.

CBS Interactive has filed a federal lawsuit in Minneapolis to clarify who controls the statistics that underlie its popular fantasy football games.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday claims the NFL Players Association has threatened to sue the company if it does not pay licensing fees for the statistics.

CBS seeks a court ruling saying that “the Players Association may not seek to control the use of player statistics in fantasy games and may not continue to extract money from CBS Interactive for the use of publicly available football statistics.”

Can you really sue someone for threatening to sue you? I guess it doesn’t matter since the real question lies with the money…. but it sure is weird.