What the EA Sports Settlement Means for the Keller Plaintiffs

It’s no surprise that EA Sports settled with the Keller plaintiffs —not when appeals courts in two circuits rejected EA Sports’ first amendment defense. Video games are not per se outside first amendment protection. The problem for EA Sports, however, was that the player avatars for each college team in its game looked just like actual players on those teams, engaged digitally in the very activity—football games—in which the actual players engaged, and an app made game use of their nam