Three Point Shot - November 2013

Whose Tat? Body Art, Copyright and Sports

Sports and Hollywood have long been inextricably linked – many athletes want to be and even become actors, countless actors have lived out their athletic fantasies on the silver screen, and it is no secret that athletes and actresses are often quite publicly attracted to each other. Recently, another area of overlap between sports and movies has emerged: the fringes of copyright law.

Both movies and sports have given rise in recent years to disputes over the copyright ownership of and accompanying reproduction and display rights to tattoos on high-profile celebrities. In 2005, a tattoo artist who inked colorful basketball player Rasheed Wallace sued Wallace, Nike and the ad agency responsible for a commercial prominently featuring Wallace's body art. In 2011, we wrote about the then-pending case in which the artist who created Mike Tyson's infamous face tattoo brought a copyright infringement claim against Warner Brothers for