NCAA/EA Sports Tipping Point?
May 6th, 2009 - byAfter much speculation it finally happened. A student athlete decided to call out the NCAA and sue them using selling products with his likeness. Now the question is how far will things go?
Former Nebraska quarterback Sam Keller is suing EA Sports for the use of student-athletes’ intellectual property. Basically he is suing for using his jersey adn likeness in the popular EA College Football video game.
The suit also accuses the NCAA and EA of conspiring and deliberately violating NCAA’s Bylaw 12.5, which, “specifically prohibits the commercial licensing of an NCAA athlete’s ‘name, picture or likeness.’” This conspiracy obviously then led to millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for EA and the NCAA.
It’s a pretty far reaching law suit, including all of EA’s NCAA-sponsored titles, and the plaintiff is seeking some 
serious compensation. Legal fee repayment (obviously), punitive, actual and statutory damages, disgorgement of all profits earned by EA from their NCAA games (ouch!) as well as the destruction of all copies of NCAA games (“to the extent permitted by law”) that have not been sold.
Since the video game features the exact numbers, skin tones, general playing style and allows gamers to upload actual names the suit would seem to have some serious legs. Darren Rovell of CNBC thinks so:
I’ve seen many lawsuits brought about by student athletes in my day and this is probably the best case I have ever seen constructed. I think Keller was smart to go after the video game business instead of the jersey business because I think he can make a better case with the former even though Nike and adidas call up football programs so that they can only produce jerseys with the numbers the stars are wearing each year.
However, could this lawsuit open up a broader conversation about athlete compensation? Will this be the blow the knocks out the giant. Could an era where college athletes are actually paid be around the horizon? What do you think?
