noname2200 said:
If I understand you correctly, and you're asking if students who play NCAA badminton should be compensated as well, I believe the answer is clearly "no." Not because of fairness, but because the reason this suit was successful was due to the NCAA and EA making money off the athletes' likenesses without permission. If EA makes college sports games with generic players, the athletes here would have no cause of action to speak of. Since the only sports where athletes' likenesses are being used for commercial gain is limited, it makes sense for only those athletes to receive compensation. If and when NCAA Track And Field becomes a thing, for example, those athletes should also receive royalties, but not before then.
The scholarship angle is also fruitless, in my opinion. The scholarships often come with huge strings attached, strings which can impact and have impacted scholastic performance due to prioritizing the sport over the academics. Moreover, athletic scholarships come with gross restrictions that do not attach to other scholarships. For example, I received several academic scholarships, some directly from the school. When I used my academic training to make money for myself while attending college, no one batted an eye. But if I had an athletic scholarship instead, and used my athletic fame to make money while attending college, it's suddenly a huge deal. This is inconsistent, unnecessary, unfair, and clearly exploitive. In truth, the restrictions on NCAA athletes exist solely because the colleges don't want to have them classified as "employees" - notwithstanding that they routinely meet the legal definition - so that the NCAA does not have to offer them compensation. Some college sports are huge business, dwarfing the NHL, MLS, and NBA. It's absurd to say that the same system that awards a football coach with multi-million dollar annual salary shouldn't offer the athletes more than a scholarship which often does not cover the entirety of their tuition. Sorry, getting a bit off topic here. Suffice it to say, I don't think the issue is that grey. |
I just think you'll hear an uproar from other sport's players that don't get compensated because their sport isn't popular enough to have video games about it. Not that the argument is valid, but I still think it's going to be chaotic. And schools do make a lot off football, yes, but they are forced to take losses on pretty much every other sport other than basketball so shouldn't they have the right to make more money that will allow other people to play less lucrative sports with scholarships?
