EA Sports Out Of College Football Business

((HT: ESPN))

It's in the game, and they're out of the game...
((HT: EA Sports))


And they have settled the lawsuit involving their usage of former NCAA player jersey numbers, heights, weights, skin tones, hair colors and home states listed in their in-game bios without their permission and without paying the ex-college players as they sold the video game on the open market- for quite some time.

And we're talking somewhere between 200-300,000 ex players that were used in the game...

Co-lead counsel Steve Berman said in a statement:

"When we filed the case, we felt very strongly that EA's appropriation of student-athletes' images for a for-profit venture was wrong, both in a legal sense and from a more fundamental moral perspective. These guys were busting their butts on the field or the court trying to excel at athletics, oftentimes to help win or maintain scholarships so they could get an education.

"Students agreed that by being student-athletes that they could not exploit their personal commercial value, an agreement they lived up to. The same cannot be said about the NCAA or its partner Electronic Arts."

Darren Rovell discusses...


EA Sports and their licensing partner, CLC, will not admit any wrongdoing and now the NCAA is going it alone in the class-action suit with Sam Keller and Ed O'Bannon as plaintiffs.

The NCAA isn't ready to cave on that end just yet as EA will now go it without their college football game...

Ex-NCAA Athletes Win This Round In EA Lawsuit

((HT: Reuters))

The case is known as:

In re: NCAA Student-Athlete Name & Likeness Licensing Litigation, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 10-15387; and Brown v. Electronic Arts Inc in the same court, No. 09-56675.

By a 2-1 vote, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Electronic Arts' use of former college players in its NCAA Football and NCAA Basketball games did not deserve protection as free expression under the First Amendment.

EA is being sued by ex-college athletes saying their likenesses were used without their permission...

Former Arizona State QB Sam Keller and others claimed that EA had misappropriated their identities and likenesses without compensation.

Electronic Arts said it plans to appeal.

((Of course they are...))

Circuit Judge Jay Bybee wrote the majority opinion saying that EA "literally recreates Keller in the very setting in which he has achieved renown,"

Judge Bybee also said that pretty much everything associated with Keller's character on the 2005 version of the game resembled Keller's own live, actual person...

Here's the background on Keller's three-year chase to date with Mark Fainaru-Wada...
((HT: OTL on ESPN))


The HQ knows this isn't over by a long shot...