Celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D has won in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over copyright infringement.
The famous influencer and tattoo artist was sued after a photographer alleged that one of her designs used his photograph as reference, and in doing so infringed copyright and violated his intellectual property rights.
Yet on Friday (March 1st) a federal court filed in favour of Von D as a jury unanimously ruled that she did not violate copyright law with her design after being accused by photographer Jeffrey Sedlik.
How did the lawsuit start?
The case centres around a tattoo that Von D, real name Katherine Von Drachenberg, inked in 2017 using a design featuring American jazz legend Miles Davis with his fingers on his lips. The original image was photographed by Jeffrey Sedlik in 1989, and he later accused the celebrity tattoo artist of violating the copyright of his work.
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After Kat shared a photo of her inking the tattoo design onto someone's arm on Instagram and shared it with her 10 million followers, the snap earned almost 85,000 likes and was widely shared online.
Yet four years later in 2021, Sedlik filed a suit against the celebrity tattooist, claiming that her work is substantially similar to his photograph. A year later in 2022 a judge in California ruled that that the case would go to trial.
The case could have massively changed the world of tattooing
In a filing at the time, lawyers for Von D wrote: “Holding tattoo artists civilly liable for copyright infringement will necessarily expose the clients of these artists to the same civil liability anytime they choose to get tattoos based on copyrighted source material, display their tattooed bodies in public, or share social media posts of their tattoos.
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“That is not the law and cannot be the law.”
The case could have seriously changed the game for tattoo artists if the outcome had been different.
Shubha Ghosh, an intellectual property law professor at Syracuse University told The New York Times: "If you’re a tattoo artist, somebody comes in and says, 'I want to get this tattooed on my body,' you now have to worry about, ‘Well, who has a copyright of that thing you gave me?'"
The verdict
After the final verdict was delivered this month, Alan Grodsky, Kat Von D’s lawyer told media: "This case should never have been brought.
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"It took the jury two hours to come to the same conclusion that everybody should have come to from the start: That what happened here was not an infringement."
Not backing down
It appears that Sedlik isn't going to let this argument go as he plans to appeal.
His lawyer explained: "Obviously, we’re very disappointed. There are certain issues that never should have gone to the jury. The first, whether the tattoo and the photograph were substantially similar.
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"Not only are they substantially similar, but they’re strikingly similar."
He added: "This case is not about tattoos. This case is about the visual artists having their work protected, and not used without permission by others.”
Von D came to fame after starring in the reality shows Miami Ink and LA Ink. Her Instagram account has more than 900,000 followers.
Topics: Celebrity, US News, Entertainment
Niamh Spence