Who Owns the Copyright to Tattoos? A Court Issues a Landmark Ruling Over LeBron James and Other NBA Stars’ Right to License Their Body Art

Does the license for a tattoo
belong to the artist who designed it or the person on whose body it
appears? 

That was the question a federal
judge took up last week in a landmark copyright lawsuit brought by
a tattoo artist whose designs appeared on NBA players whose
likenesses were reproduced in a video game. 

In 2016, the tattoo company
Solid Oak Sketches sued Take-Two Interactive, a video game publisher that’s behind
the NBA2K series of games, for the unauthorized
reproduction of its tattoo designs on Lebron James and two other
NBA players.

The US district court judge came down on the side
of the video game company, writing that the
“tattooists necessarily granted the Players nonexclusive licenses
to use the Tattoos as part of their likenesses.”

Solid Oak’s lawsuit made
headlines when it was first filed, both because of the high-profile
names involved, and because of the novelty of the issue at hand.
Even James himself weighed in: “I always thought that I had the right to
license what I look like to other people for various merchandise,
television appearances, and
other types of creative works, like video games,” he said in
a court
filing in
2018.

The judge ultimately agreed with
James when she “effectively decided that the right of the athletes
to license their likeness was not enslaved by the copyright
interests of those artists that had inked the athletes,” Amelia
Brankov, a copyright lawyer not involved in the case, told Artnet
News.

Further, the judge argued that
because the replicated designs under consideration could only be
found on three of the 400 players in the game, and because the
likenesses of the tattoos were less than a 10th of the size of the
real-life tattoos, copyright infringement did not
apply.  

Whether or not the
decision will impact future
cases on body art is still to be seen, but Brankov notes that there
are several other pending cases against video game publishers that
pertain to tattoos.

“While other courts are not
obligated to follow her reasoning, [this judge’s] decision could be
a harbinger of dismissals in other cases,” Brankov
says. 

The post Who Owns the Copyright to Tattoos? A Court Issues a
Landmark Ruling Over LeBron James and Other NBA Stars’ Right to
License Their Body Art appeared first on artnet
News.