Name, Image and Likeness and the Law with Dr. John Holden, J.D. - Oklahoma State University

What is your name? My name is John Holden. Where did it all start? where did you go get undergrad? Any grad school degrees? Okay so I did my undergraduate degree at Concordia University in Canada, and then I did a masters at Florida State in sport management and then I went and did a law degree at Michigan State and a law degree at the University of Ottawa. Then I decided to go and do a PhD at Florida State again. Okay what was the PhD in? Sports management. 

Okay now what year did you start at Spears? Throughout all of that, when did you come to Spears? I started Spears in 2018. Okay and what courses do you teach? I teach Legal and Regulatory environment of business, which is more commonly known as B law. I teach the sports Law class which is a MGMT class, 3963 called social issues and Sport management. I teach a name image likeness and the law class which focuses on Name, Image and likeness in college sports. 

Okay so touching on that, what do you think are the top three things students should take away from that course? I think one of the big things that they should take away is that college sports has changed a lot over the years. One of the other big things to take away is that, the the ability of athletes to make money from their name image and likeness, really just levels the playing field and makes them like other students on campus. It's not something special that they're getting. It's simply leveling the playing field. I think sort of the final thing is that this is not the end of this sort of so-called "Student athletes Rights Movement." There's a lot of other areas that student athletes and those advocates in the area are fighting for, including recognition of student athletes as employees of the university. 

Now you mentioned movements, what are some of the movements that have happened? Sure so I think the biggest thing that's happened in the last couple of years has been the NCAA's change of position that allows student athletes to begin earning money. For a hundred years, the organization had said "that would ruin college sports, you can't do that. If athletes make money, they'll just be professionals." 

After a number of states began passing laws allowing athletes to do this by virtue of state law, the NCAA at the last minute threw up their hands and said "fine." So it's a pretty substantial change. When it comes to law in that area what are some things that people may not know? So I think some of the things that people don't know are just how many areas of law affect people in everyday life really. Not just college sports but the law impacts everything. Every time you buy something at a store you're engage in a contract/negotiation. 

The same is true of sports. The number of laws that run through our everyday lives that we don't even think about, are so numerous and it really is a long list. When it comes to specifically NIL law.. Sure so when we're talking about NIL, we're talking about intellectual property. We're talking about contracts and we're talking about antitrust as well. So it's these organizations getting together and collectively making decisions on behalf of another group of people.