## Facts

- The Board of Trade operated a regulated commodities futures exchange; trading any futures contract required Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approval.
- Dow Jones gathered and published financial news, operated wire services, and calculated and disseminated the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) to subscribers.
- Federal regulators treated “well established stock market indices” as a prerequisite for approval of stock index futures contracts, making use of established indices practically necessary for an exchange seeking to list such products.
- The Board proposed a stock index futures contract whose settlement value would be “based on, and identical to” the DJIA.
- Dow Jones objected, asserting proprietary rights in the DJIA and alleging that use of the DJIA as the underlying index for futures trading without consent would be unauthorized commercial exploitation and misappropriation.
- The Board filed an Illinois state-court action seeking a declaratory judgment that using the DJIA as the basis for the contract would not violate Dow Jones’s rights.

## Issues

1. Whether Dow Jones had a legally protectable proprietary interest in the DJIA that would allow it to prevent the Board from using the DJIA as the benchmark for an index futures contract without consent.
2. Whether the Board’s proposed use of the DJIA constituted actionable misappropriation or unfair competition.
3. Whether requiring a clear disclaimer could adequately address concerns about confusion or implied sponsorship.

## Decision

- The appellate court affirmed the declaratory judgment for the Board.
- It held that the Board could use the DJIA as the basis for the proposed index futures contract, provided the contract included a disclaimer stating Dow Jones did not sponsor, endorse, or participate in the contract.
- The court rejected Dow Jones’s claim that the proposed reference use unlawfully misappropriated a proprietary interest in the DJIA.

## Legal Principles

- A widely disseminated numerical index derived from public market data, once published, may be treated as public financial information that others may reference as a benchmark in commercial transactions.
- Misappropriation doctrine does not automatically confer an exclusive right to control downstream, reference-based uses of published index values where the defendant is not selling a substitute for the publisher’s product.
- Where the principal risk is confusion about affiliation or sponsorship, a prominent disclaimer can be a material remedy that reduces unfair-competition concerns.
- Courts may be reluctant to recognize an exclusive proprietary interest that would effectively give a private publisher veto power over regulated markets’ ability to design products that require established public benchmarks.

## Conclusion

The appellate court concluded that using the DJIA as the settlement benchmark for an index futures contract, coupled with an explicit non-sponsorship disclaimer, did not amount to misappropriation of Dow Jones’s rights and was permissible under Illinois law as applied in this decision.


Bd. of Trade of Chi. v. Dow Jones & Co., 108 Ill. App. 3d 681 (Ill. App. Ct. 1982)