WWE’s Third Party Talent Restrictions To Be Case By Case

Thanks for the clarification? There have been a lot of changes taking place in WWE as of late and one of the biggest has taken place behind the scenes. Last week, WWE issued an order to its wrestlers, banning them from using most third party platforms, likely including Cameo and Twitch. Things have been clarified a bit since then, but it turns out that it is even more confusing than it might have seemed.

One of the biggest issues in the situation was over the ownership of the wrestlers’ real names and likenesses. While the wrestlers were the ones performing under the names and the ones that the fans would be more likely to recognize, WWE owns the character names and may have claimed that they owned the real names as well. That did not set well with some wrestlers, and things may be about to get even worse.

According to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, WWE’s policy is not a new one, but rather the company reinforcing their regular contracts. The wrestlers are allowed to make money outside of WWE, but using their real names rather than their characters. However, each case will likely be held on an individual basis, including how much is communicated to WWE. Vince McMahon had wanted to make such a change for the last several months but the Coronavirus pandemic took precedent.

Social media is rather important to WWE. Check out some of their moments involving the medium:

Opinion: I know this isn’t the most popular decision in the world but the more I think about this, the more I side with WWE. At the end of the day, those names and copyrights belong to the company and these wrestlers are making extra money on the side off of those names. Now that being said, shutting them down completely from making any form of outside money is going too far, especially when you factor in the independent contractors detail. WWE needed to change something, but maybe it shouldn’t be so severe.

What do you think of WWE’s move? Will there be a middle ground? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. Thank you for reading!