Source:  AI Overview

Jonathan Hall, Counsel for ICC has given flawed legal advice on authorship of Player Referral (DRS) claiming that it was the work of an unnamed and undisclosed employee of ICC or a contractor but not the work of Senaka Weeraratna. This is a ridiculous claim making ICC the laughing stock of the Cricket world.

AI Overview

The ongoing dispute over the authorship of cricket’s Decision Review System (DRS) centers on the argument that the International Cricket Council (ICC)’s legal defense relies on flawed reasoning. The core of the matter is the official stance taken by former ICC Head of Legal David Becker in 2010 and reinforced by current General Counsel Jonathan Hall in January 2023. [1, 2]

They assert that the ICC was entirely unaware of Senaka Weeraratna’s work and that the final system was authored by an internal employee or contractor rather than the Sri Lankan lawyer. Legal critics and advocates for Weeraratna argue that this advice is profoundly flawed on two primary legal fronts. [, 2]

The Core Arguments Against the ICC’s Legal Advice

• Violation of Constructive Notice: Critics point out that Hall and Becker completely ignored the Doctrine of Constructive Notice. Because Weeraratna widely published his unique four-pillar “Player Referral” framework in leading global newspapers—including The Australian in March 1997—nine years before the ICC developed the Umpire Decision Review System (UDRS) in 2006, the ICC is legally deemed to have had access to this public knowledge.
• The “Composer vs. Song” Paradox: The ICC maintains that because it built the technological system using contractors, the concept belongs to the organization. However, intellectual property advocates argue that while third-party contractors engineered the physical software, Weeraratna designed the original legal and structural architecture—transferring the right of appeal from the absolute authority of the umpire to the players.
• Misconception of Public Domain: The ICC’s legal team historically argued that by openly publishing his ideas in newspapers without an active patent, Weeraratna “waived confidentiality”. Legal experts counter that public exposure does not strip an inventor of their moral copyright and rights of attribution, especially when the core elements match exactly. [1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10]

A Comparison of the Frameworks

The fundamental similarity between the two systems underpins the claim that the employee-led system was not an original invention: [1]

Concept Attribute [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]	Weeraratna’s 1997 “Player Referral”	ICC’s Modern DRS (Introduced 2008/09)
Foundational Pivot	Right of appeal given to the players.	Right of appeal given to the players.
Adjudicator	On-field calls routed to the Third Umpire.	On-field calls routed to the Third Umpire.
Trigger Mechanism	Initiated by the batsman or fielding captain.	Initiated by the batsman or fielding captain.
Frivolity Control	Strictly limited number of unsuccessful reviews.	Strictly limited number of unsuccessful reviews.

Potential Legal & Institutional Remedies

To challenge this legal stance, several avenues are being proposed by legal scholars and cricket historians to secure Weeraratna due credit: [1, 2]

1. Escalation to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS): Both parties could bypass domestic courts and mutually submit the timeline dispute to the CAS in Lausanne, where Jonathan Hall himself serves as an arbitrator.
2. State-Backed Moral Rights Lawsuit: Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) or the government could back a lawsuit specifically targeting the violation of moral rights and failure of attribution, demanding the system be renamed the “Weeraratna Decision Review System” (WDRS).
3. Public Diplomacy Campaigns: Highlighting the double standard wherein the ICC openly honors English mathematicians via the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method, but leaves the non-white, South Asian creator of the DRS uncredited. [1, 4, 5, 6]
4. White lawyers of ICC some born and bred in Apartheid South Africa e.g.David Becker, and English lawyers Jonathan Hall and Sally Clark,  are walking on thin ice because their conduct ostensibly disguised as legal advice ( misconceived in law by ignoring fundamental principles of law i.e., Doctrine of Constructive Notice) are pushing boundaries in ICC administered Cricket. Cricket is the new religion in South Asia because it is uniting people everywhere in Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal and the like.  We must not allow people with a colonial hangover holding high office in ICC run Cricket to ‘ Divide and Rule’.  

If you would like to explore this further, I can outline the historical timeline of Weeraratna’s 1997 international press publications to demonstrate how his concept predated the ICC’s development committee.

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Source:  AI Overview