Videogame maker Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) and the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) recently announced that they had agreed to settle claims by putative classes of current and former college athletes whose images, likenesses and names the settling defendants had used without authorization and without compensation. The full terms of the proposed settlement have not yet been made public and will need to be approved by Judge Claudia Wilken of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but the reported amount of the settlement is $40 million. The defendants hope that an approved settlement will resolve substantial uncertainty and remove them from a larger battle between the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and current and former college football and basketball players.
As an EA executive explained in a recent public statement: “We have been stuck in the middle of a dispute between the NCAA and student-athletes who seek compensation for playing college football.”1 Meanwhile, the plaintiffs hope that the settlement is a turning point in the student-athletes’ larger fight,2 but in order to be approved, the final settlement will need to grapple with difficult questions of who should be compensated, when and in what amounts.
