”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,” stated the student-athletes legal rep Steve Berman, ”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.”
In other words, while college student-athletes are prohibited from making money on their own name to preserve their amateur status, Collegiate Licensing Company had no problems making money off their images and selling them to EA.
