Many Athletes Unknowingly Sign Away Rights to Profit From Their Images

April 20, 2011, 11:44 pm

Chapel Hill, N.C.—Does the NCAA’s use of former athletes’ images and likenesses infringe upon their rights? That question, which is at the heart of a federal class-action lawsuit, has prompted a wave of recent academic studies, some of whose results were presented here on Wednesday at a conference sponsored by the College Sport Research Institute.

In one of the most interesting studies, researchers asked 3,000 football and men’s basketball players if they realized that, by signing a consent form the NCAA requires them to hand over before suiting up, they were giving the association and its licensees permission to profit from their image or likeness. Of the nearly 300 players who responded to the survey, almost half said they didn’t understand what rights they were signing away. And four out of 10 said there should be additional information clarifying how the NCAA uses their images.

DJ Looney, a former football player at Mississippi State University, recalls signing 30 or so forms at the beginning of the year, but not that one. “You hope they’re all in your best interest,” he says, “but you just want to get out of that meeting in 15 minutes.”

The results could prove valuable for lawyers in Ed O’Bannon’s closely watched case against the NCAA, Michael McCann, a professor of law and director of the Sports Law Institute at Vermont Law School, said in an e-mail. Although the study concerns the views of current athletes while the O’Bannon lawsuit centers on the legal rights of former players, the study still goes to the issue of whether college athletes are adequately informed of their legal rights and of the implications of potentially waiving away identity rights in perpetuity, Mr. McCann said.

The athletes’ confusion didn’t stop with the form. Fifty-four percent of the survey’s respondents thought that by appearing in video games bearing their images or likenesses, they were endorsing those commercial goods, said Anastasios Kaburakis, an assistant professor of management and sports business at Saint Louis University and the study’s lead author.

“They weren’t getting any money, but they still felt they were actually endorsing the product,” he said in a phone interview.

Despite the confusion, 97 percent of respondents liked being featured in video games, and two-thirds believed that the way the NCAA and video-game companies used their image or likeness was fair. But only 33 percent believed that their athletic scholarship was sufficient payment for the use of their image or likeness. (Mr. O’Bannon’s lawyers would most likely focus on that last point, Mr. McCann said, as it is a core argument in his case.)

Mr. Kaburakis and his fellow researchers—who include David Pierce, of Ball State University; Beth A. Cianfrone, of Georgia State University; and Amanda L. Paule, of Bowling Green State University—plan to submit their paper for publishing within the next few weeks.

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tee_bee

And the bulldog, being smaller, is again the underdog. In at least two ways.
robert_wyatt

“The athletes’ confusion”, “almost half said they didn’t understand”, “(un)informed of their legal rights and of the implications”

Perhaps they should attend an institution of higher education.
jesor

I’m wondering if a creative lawyer couldn’t impeach the concept that this is an athletic “scholarship”. By definition, a scholarship is a gift with certain strings attached (i.e. good gpa). Once it gets beyond a certain point, it may transition into an employment contract and 15 minutes worth of form signing, including licensing agreements seems to push it into that category. The question then becomes, are these players subject to minimum wage laws, Fair Labor Standards and Practices Act protections, etc? Is the NCAA subject to antitrust laws too? What about players from out of the country? Are they violating their visas by engaging in unathorized employment?
gabrile

Also, these foreign students don’t just come to the West for the degree. For many, a temporary culture replacement isn’t so bad. There are over 4,000 schools in the US from which to choose. While there are many standouts, there are also many comparable institutions. There are obvious benefits to earning a degree here, but it is the education plus the opportunity to live elsewhere that is alluring. Just like domestic students going on study abroad trips.
jkline

Western tradition has become ubiquitous because of a general consistency. This consistency allows people to move from country-to-country or institution-to-institution with relative ease. This is one hallmark of globalization.

Within “Western” education there are differences. A review of schools in EUR, AUS, NZ, and the US shows differences in curriculum, expectations, time-to-complete, and even the meaning of PhD. But if I say I have a Bachelors degree everyone in a Western school understands that educational level.
I had a colleague who purported to publish important work with a co-author in Ukrainian journals written in non-English. Fortunately, he was tenured, but it was hard to discern the legitimacy of these efforts. I would never want to decide a hire or tenure based on a model that is non-Western, unless I could get a lot of background information. I feel this is pragmatic and fair for everyone, not xenophobic.

My point is that problems arise at the boundaries of different cultures. It would be an injustice for Western schools to act like we accept a wide range of educational backgrounds but turn down people from these non-Western schools for hiring and graduate schools. Much like currency, there needs to be equivalencies for higher education in order to accommodate globalization.

Colonization is a bit strong. Growth due to standardization is more accurate. Unfortunately, indigenous education seems to be paying the price for this standardization effort.
Guest

I wonder if this author is related to Aaron Wildavsky, that Berkeley professor whom I admired a great deal. I sense a little of Aaron Wildavsky in his prose.

The Western academic model is not in great shape, as far as I can tell. American colleges had decades of plush surplus but those days are ending. Much of what other countries admire about American higher education was based on unsustainable systems of debt and high tuition.
shib78

The writer protests too much. He criticizes without taking the time to understand why other academics would put together such a conference. It reminds me how some (willfully?) misunderstand Said. Were the conference participants saying that there was nothing redeeming in western universities? Probably not. Give me a break. The writer trivialized their concerns & goals, making them into a strawman that could be easily sliced down.
http://www.facebook.com/zeldaha Zelda Haro

Are people really surprised by this?
richardtaborgreene

The current hobby wars the US is waging in Islamic nations–justified by falsified or hugely mistaken sloppy work—supports the anti-West stuff of this conference. The people killed by US hobby wars strongly proclaim that colonial interference is alive and well while they themselves are no longer alive (to put it effectively oddly). That is one pole.

Another pole is the erosion of investigation, methods, publishings, and results wherever people are not forced into them—these complaining nations and academias are rife, immensely rife, with falsified research, publishings, promotions, and the like. A huge industry throughout East and South Asia of phony conferences, in one nation but all the participants from ONE other nations, created solely to up conference presentation numbers for promotions and to raise international rankings of particular deans, presidents, and schools. There must be dozens of such phony conferences in Japan alone every year, with no Japanese participation but done by particular non-Japan nations in Asia to up numbers. The quality of presentations there are absolutely beyond belief. Most of us would not accept such work from our kids in middle school.

So we have truth split onto two opposing poles—the conference people are right, Western nations continue to traipse around the world choosing its weakest poorest nations and sending armies in to kill people. Not very nice. And the non-conference people are right—the complaining nations of that conference have yet to show a will and capability to meet Western standards of investigation, methods, publishing, and results.

IF IF IF they had AN OTHER SYSTEM, a different form of higher education that matched or out-performed Western universities, then some real discussing could go on on this matter. BUT they lack an alternative with anything like the same amount of results (half of all children on earth NOT dying before the age of 10 due to vaccines against dozens of diseases for the simplest example). They lack an alternative with anything like the replicated in all cultures and places and times results of published Western research (to be sure only a fraction of Western research reaches this standard). They lack an alternative LOYALTY TO TRUTH, beyond family, era, culture, religion, profit—that dream of the 1606 Societe Philosophe in Paris, that ” I am more a citizen of truth than of France”. They entirely lack that aim, ambitions, and most in fact outlaw that attitude and approach.

Both poles are right and therefore, the West has a lot to learn and the East has a lot to learn and only he who does not have a glass house in this matter should safely throw stones. The conference threw stones without taking responsibility for an alternative or improvement in what it denigrated. Hating the world is easy; improving it is a pain!!!! for us all.

The conference rather than throwing stones one-sidedly could have made progress by a balanced critique:
1) US phony research, the vast majority of it unread because unreadibly trivial and invalid (correlations are not causation, effects without magnitudes are usually worthless for practice)
2) East Asian research, data chosen and analyzed without literature review or contribution to a dialog among global scholars/publications—data analysis because data is easy and analysis is easy (Kennedy school type stuff)
3) European Giant Overweening Masters—who publish thousands of pages of unsubstantiated opinions STILL–legends in their own minds.
EVERYONE has their own preferred forms of slop, junk, waste, and evil. SO, such a conference COULD have addressed—-
10) WHAT NEW FORM OF RESEARCH gets beyond US phony papers of topics tiny enough to make their pitiful maths work, gets beyond East Asian reasonless data choice and analysis, and gets beyond cosmic scale dumps of European lordly personal opinions?
OKAY what does that job? I want to know. I have failed to solve this myself thus far. A conference on this just might come up with a form of research and international supports for it that overcome Western research phoninesses, East Asia research phoninesses, and European research phoninesses.

Take Chinese medicine in the USA now as a case showing how HARD addressing this question 10 above would be:
The Chinese medicine approach (vastly simplified) is simple–10,000 bee stings not one tipping point (the Western medicine approach is find that one tipping point where slight inputs change whole systems). So you are a small in stature woman with rheumatoid arthritis–the Western approach is extremely purified chemicals that shut down powerful parts of the immune system, saving joints and increasing cancer risk 10 to 40 times above normal (the women die in some other physician’s department so rheumatology appear non-deadly). The chinese case is showing up in 2010 and 2011 much more powerful—women of short stature (or of any of 22 other traits that tilt for this illness) need clean synovial fluid, which requires good blood clearing, which require good functioning livers, which requires great bile flows (the smallness of diameter of that tube in short women causes many to suffer dirty blood etc.). So Western medicine give ONE highly pure chemical to increase bile flow (say by lowering viscosity of the bile)—BUT that purification makes a side-effect magnified, that kills the women (eventually). The Chinese approach is five different medicines each of which increases bile flow by slightly different mechanisms, and each is given in herbal form, not highly purified, so side-effects are slight AND since each of the 5 has different side-effects, NO final harm is done by the treatment. The NIH has sat on this data for over 8 years while British and Canadian practitioners and scholars get deeply excited about and pay for testing of it on patient populations. Those interested can write me for the leading NIH publication practitioner of the Chinese approach—he has 18,000 patients in East Asia and is 80 years old but still publishes in NIH journals twice or so a year—amazing person.

All I am saying is:
in a matter of life and death
for tens of millions of women in the Western world
the West holds onto its preferred form of solution, while it manifestly does harm and cures not
the West finds continual excuses and delays for the Eastern 10,000 bee stings approach.

So East and West may both be right and both be wrong, but they have NOT show a lot of ability or will to learn from each other.
http://twitter.com/Nathan_Andrews1 Nathan Andrews

Insightful, and of course thought-provoking…..but the epistemic oppression has to stop!
laundrydishes

Well thank goodness for people like Ben Wildavsky who knows better than those silly-speaking people who don’t know what’s truly good for themselves.
pesor33

I have to agree with you gabrile. I think the US has a great deal to offer people from other countries. After all, look who owns most of the businesses.
ralfjritter

Mr. Wildavsky is correct to point out that the Western model of education should not be considered as “colonial academic oppression” – such a theme is absurd. Yet, as with all things, we should also not become narcissistic about our own systems. Perhaps there are some elements elsewhere that would lend themselves to some kind of “fusion academics”. We have to be careful that we don’t start saying “you’re either with us or against us” and that goes for all: North,South,West，East. A lot also depends on context and what is taught.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RSRD4KFLLVQHEM4QYHLLFBQR6M chaz

“We are firmly convinced that every trace of Eurocentrism in our
universities – reflected in various insidious forms of western controls
over publications, theories, and models of research must be subordinated
to our scintillating cultural and intellectual traditions.”

While I admire the aims of this conference, I think the author is right to call the rhetoric of the manifesto “silly.” As other commentators have pointed out or alluded to, the real problem with conferences like this is the lack of a real vision of specific steps to implement a genuine alternative. I’m sure many papers used terms like “Towards” or prefixes like “Re-” to start their titles – always a bad sign.

On a rhetorical note, notice how the authors of the above quote fixate on the West and its insidious – or so we are meant to believe – “control” of all things academic. This is stating the obvious and fixating on the “West” – a homogenizing term itself – as a convenient boogeyman. The much harder work of imagining a viable alternative has yet to be started. Until coming up with genuine solutions that fit quotidian realities is the central focus of conferences which attempt to rethink the “norm,” conferences like this will be a nice way for grad students and professors to justify a short vacation to themselves.
bambino

I have to say I enjoyed the smugness of the author’s assertion about the obvious preeminence of the Western University over other possible educational model.

It reminds me of the way the West approaches (and as always) approached other cultures in general. We define the playing field, set up the rules of engagement, bemoan the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t understand what’s good for them, celebrate the few who have adopted a “if you can’t win, join them” attitude as progressive beacons of enlightened understanding, castigate those who resist as backwards-looking reactionaries, and go home pleased with ourselves with yet another display of our innate superiority.

Nothing new under the sun. If Barthes were alive today, he would have a field day.