Former Georgia Tech captain Roddy Jones said he was shocked that his and teammate Jason Peters’ images were being used in ads for FanDuel, the daily fantasy sports company. Jones said that FanDuel had not compensated them nor sought their permission to use their images, which came from promotional materials for Tech’s 2011 season. Likewise, Tech was also not contacted.
Jones, who is in his first year as a sideline reporter for the ACC Network, first caught wind of it when Sedric Griffin, a former teammate of Peters’ and Jones’, posted a screen cap from the commercial on Facebook in late August.
“I was like, That’s interesting. I’ll come back to that later,” Jones said. “Then probably a week later, my brother Darius called me and said, ‘Have you seen the commercial? Because you’re on it.’ I was kind of shocked by that.”
Credit: Ken Sugiura
Credit: Ken Sugiura
Credit: Ken Sugiura
Credit: Ken Sugiura
The matter gained wider notice after reporting by Deadspin broke the story about the apparent copyright infringement. Speaking recently, Jones had said he and Peters were waiting to see how the situation unfolded from Tech's standpoint and were possibly looking into legal representation. Tech counsel has looked into the matter.
“They said they make someone a millionaire every day, so why not me?” Jones said with a laugh.
FanDuel has sought to remove the content in question from circulation, according to Deadspin. FanDuel worked with a third-party ad agency to produce the advertisements and had been unaware of the unauthorized image usage, according to a FanDuel statement to the website.
While FanDuel is working to pull the ads, according to the statement, they continue to run. According to iSpot.TV, the following ad ran Tuesday night on ESPN News.
FanDuel and DraftKings, a similar daily fantasy sports company, may have bigger problems. They have been accused of "insider trading" after a DraftKings employee reportedly won $350,000 on FanDuel using information not generally available to the public.
