Meaghan H. Kent

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The perfect addition to any project is music. Whether you are making a video advertisement for your product; including music in your posts on your company website, TikTok, or YouTube; posting an at-home workout video for your clients; using music at corporate events; or playing music at your bar or restaurant – music is a vital part of society. Music is also the most common reason your content may be muted or taken down from social media, in addition to being exposed to potential liability for copyright infringement and related monetary damages. When you use someone’s music without their permission, absent a few extremely limited exceptions, you are infringing on their copyright.1

For the vast majority of music uses, you will first need to obtain permission. In this article, we lay out some fundamentals to assist in determining the type of license an average company would need and some potential alternatives. Bottom line: when you are planning and budgeting for music in a project, make sure you get the proper rights and permissions in place before pressing “Play.”…

Continue Reading Conducting Your Way Through Music Licensing: The Most Common Issues

Fortnite: Battle Royale (Fortnite), the highest-earning game in 2019 at $1.8 billion, continues to drive the world of esports.1 Epic Games, its development company, provided $100 million in cash winnings for its summer World Cup, the finals for which took place at Arthur Ashe Stadium in July. The Sunday finale of the event was, according to Epic, the most-watched competitive gaming event (excluding China) of all time. 2 Part of the Fortnite game’s success is due to its creative and memorable celebratory dances known as emotes. Many of these emotes, often inspired by real-world examples from movies, TV series, and social media, enjoy a life beyond the game, as celebrities perform them and athletes use them to celebrate goals and victories.

This high level of success and popularity has inevitably also made the game an inviting target for litigation. In the past eighteen months, several cases have been brought against the company regarding some of the game’s most popular emotes. These cases provide insight for gamers and game developers into potential claims they may face and how to appropriately clear rights and avoid claims.…

Continue Reading Gaming Emote Litigation: Battle Royale Ensues Over Fortnite Emotes with Plaintiffs Testing Different Causes of Action

The complicated relationship between paparazzi, social media, and celebrities continues in the copyright space. We previously wrote about the cases that had emerged related to Gigi Hadid and Victoria Beckham as well as many other celebrities. Both Hadid and Beckham posted photos taken by paparazzi on their social media accounts and were subsequently sued for copyright infringement. These cases have raised interesting legal arguments at the intersection of copyright enforcement and a celebrity’s right of publicity in their own image, including whether a license could be implied when a celebrity poses for a photograph, or whether that pose creates a co-authorship interest.

Liam Hemsworth is the latest celebrity to make headlines for a related scenario. The photograph at issue in Hemsworth’s case was taken as part of a series of photos depicting him on location for production of a film released earlier this year, Isn’t It Romantic. See ECF No. 1, Splash News and Picture Agency, LLC v. Liam Hemsworth, No. 2:19-cv-10584 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 15, 2019). The photo was licensed exclusively to The Daily Mail. On July 15, 2018, the same day that it was posted to The Daily Mail, the photo of Hemsworth also appeared, without its copyright information as produced on The Daily Mail‘s website, on one of Hemsworth’s social media accounts. It also included a “tag” promoting the movie. On June 20, 2019, the photo again appeared on the same social media account, including a feature to encourage viewers to vote for Isn’t It Romantic at the Teen Choice Movie Awards.…

Continue Reading #CopyrightInfringement: The Sequel

Supermodel Jelena Noura “Gigi” Hadid was not the first celebrity to be photographed by paparazzi and then to post the resulting photo to social media, nor was she the first to be subsequently sued for copyright infringement for doing so. Other celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez and, most recently, Victoria Beckham, have made news for the same situation.

This trend falls into an interesting intersection of two significant tenets of law: a celebrity’s right of publicity in their own image and a photographer’s right to copyright their artistic work. The district court dismissed the case due to a lack of a copyright registration. In addition to that defense, though, her attorneys also raised the defenses of fair use and implied license. The second may have begun paving the way for future legal challenges to clarify these issues by raising a novel argument—implied license—alongside the more typical defense of fair use.…

Continue Reading Are Paparazzi Images Fair Game for Social Media?