Copyright
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When does a soundalike song sound a little too much alike?
Rick Astley is suing Yung Gravy over the rapper’s breakout 2022 hit that heavily borrowed from the singer’s iconic “Never Gonna Give You Up,” alleging that the new track — an interpolation that sounded a whole lot like an outright sample — broke the law by impersonating Astley’s voice.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday (Jan. 26) in Los Angeles court, Astley claims that Gravy’s “Betty (Get Money),” which reached No. 30 on the Hot 100 last year, violated the singer’s so-called right of publicity because it closely mimicked the distinctive voice Astley used in the chart-topping 1987 hit.
“In an effort to capitalize off of the immense popularity and goodwill of Mr. Astley, defendants … conspired to include a deliberate and nearly indistinguishable imitation of Mr. Astley’s voice throughout the song,” Astley’s lawyers wrote. “The public could not tell the difference. The imitation of Mr. Astley’s voice was so successful the public believed it was actually Mr. Astley singing.”
Pulling heavily from a song that boomed in recent years thanks to “Rickroll” internet memes, “Betty” was a major hit for Yung Gravy. But it often drew attention largely for its connections to Astley; the New York Times called it “a real-life rickroll that functioned as a comedy song, a TikTok trend and a nostalgia trip all at once.”
In their new lawsuit, Astley’s lawyers said the singer was “extremely protective over his name, image, and likeness,” meaning the unauthorized use of the soundalike voice had caused him “immense damage.”
Representatives for Gravy (real name Matthew Hauri) and Universal Music Group’s Republic Records (also named in the lawsuit as the label that released “Betty”) did not immediately return a request for comment.
Thursday’s new lawsuit raises big questions about the methods used in the music industry to legally borrow from older songs, an ever more popular tactic in a nostalgia-heavy age.
When they created “Betty,” Gravy and his team allegedly cleared the underlying musical composition to “Give You Up.” That gave them the legal right to recreate music and lyrics from the original in their new track — a process known as “interpolating.”
But the lawsuit says Gravy and his team weren’t able to secure a license to use the actual sound recording of the famous track — the better-known process of “sampling.” That would mean they didn’t have any right to directly copy the exact sounds, including Astley’s voice.
Instead, Astley says they hired Popnick (real name Nick Seeley) to imitate Astley’s “signature voice” on the track. At one point, the lawsuit quotes from an Instagram video in which Popnick said he wanted the song to “sound identical” to Astley voice.
By doing so without permission, the lawsuit claims that Gravy and Popnick violated Astley’s right of publicity — the legal right to control how your name, image or likeness is commercially exploited by others.
“A license to use the original underlying musical composition does not authorize the stealing of the artist’s voice in the original recording,” Astley’s lawyers wrote. “So, instead, they resorted to theft of Mr. Astley’s voice without a license and without agreement.”
Astley’s allegations rely heavily on a 1988 federal court ruling, in which Bette Midler successfully sued the Ford Motor Co. for violating her right of publicity by running a series of commercials featuring a Midler impersonator. In that case, the court sided with Midler even though Ford had obtained a license to the underlying song.
The new lawsuit was filed by Richard Busch, a prominent music litigator best known for winning the blockbuster copyright case over “Blurred Lines.” In a statement to Billboard, Busch said: “Mr. Astley owns his voice. California law is clear since the Bette Midler case more than 30 years ago that nobody has the right to imitate or use it without his permission.”
In addition to violating Astley’s right of publicity, the lawsuit also accuses Gravy of violating federal trademark law by making false statements that made it appear that the singer had endorsed the new song. In an interview with Billboard, Gravy said he had spoken with Astley and that the singer had approved of the new song — that he “fucks with the song.”
“These statements were all false,” Astley wrote in his lawsuit.
With all the many fan theories bouncing around the internet in the weeks since Miley Cyrus released her Billboard Hot 100-topping new single “Flowers,” a particular amount of attention has been paid to its relationship to Bruno Mars‘ own No. 1 hit from a decade earlier, the torch song ballad “When I Was Your Man.”
Countless fans have pointed out the lyrical similarities between the two songs — particularly their respective choruses — with “Flowers” echoing many of Mars’ regretful sentiments from an opposing, unmoved perspective. (For example, Mars laments on “Your Man,” “I should’ve bought you flowers… take you to every party, ’cause all you wanted to dance,” while Cyrus protests on “Flowers,” “I can buy myself flowers… I can take myself dancing.”) Speculation behind the extended reference has centered around the song being a favorite of Liam Hemsworth’s, furthering the idea of the song as a kiss-off to Cyrus’ real-life ex. The buzz over the two songs was even enough to give “Your Man” a nearly 20% bump in weekly streams in the frame following the release of Cyrus’ new single.
With the relationship between the two songs appearing obvious to fans, many have wondered over social media whether Mars or “Your Man” co-writers Andrew Wyatt, Philip Lawrence and Ari Levine deserve writing credits on “Flowers.” To a degree, this sort of thing — offering writing credits to obvious sources of musical inspiration — has become common practice in new songs by popular artists, even if a direct sample is not present and the use of an interpolation is an arguable matter of interpretation. Well-publicized cases of that phenomenon include Olivia Rodrigo adding Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Farro to the credits of her “Good 4 U” due to the song’s musical similarities to their “Misery Business,” and Beyoncé including “Show Me Love” scribes Fred McFarlane and Allen George in the credits to her “Break My Soul” due to some overlapping sonic elements with the Robin S. smash.
The case of “Flowers” and “When I Was Your Man” is a little different, though. Those previously mentioned examples were mostly based around sonic similarities — melodic, rhythmic and textural — which were close enough in nature that a case could have been made that the original’s copyright was infringed upon. However, not only are there no direct samples or obvious interpolations between “Flowers” and “Your Man,” there are no major sonic overlaps either — no obvious shared melodies or rhythms, no major similarities in production textures. When Cyrus sings “I can buy myself flowers,” for instance, she does so in a cadence and melody of her own, without any significant similarity to how Mars sang “I should’ve bought you flowers.”
The only obvious similarities, then, are in the songs’ lyrics — which are not identical, but do share elements and ideas — and merely using some of the same words as an older song is not considered grounds for infringement.
“This is great fodder for fan theories, but lawyers should have nothing to do with it,” says Joseph Fishman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville and an expert in music law. “There are no songwriter credits for the ‘When I Was Your Man’ writers because no license should be necessary.”
Cyrus’ arguable use of Mars’ lyrics as a reference point for her own expression is certainly not without precedent, with the “answer song” serving as a longtime staple of popular music. Famous examples include any number of responses (The Miracles’ “I Got a Job,” The Heartbeats’ “I Found a Job”) to The Silhouettes’ ’50s doo-wop staple “Get a Job,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s rejoinder to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” in their ’70s southern rock classic “Sweet Home Alabama” (“I hope Neil Young will remember/ Southern man don’t need him around anyhow”) and countless rap diss records dating back to the ongoing “Roxanne Wars” of the mid-’80s, when male rap group U.T.F.O. and female rappers Roxanne Shanté and The Real Roxanne (among others) all traded barbs with new singles. While many of these singles included lyrical references to their predecessors, most did not include additional writing credits for those songs’ performers.
“Lyrically, sure, there’s enough similarity to make listeners think that ‘Flowers’ is deliberately responding to the earlier song,” Fishman offers. “But even if we assume that’s true, so what? Using one song to issue a retort to an earlier song is not, by itself, infringement. John Mayer and Taylor Swift don’t need to cross-license anything when they write songs at each other.”
Does all this mean that there’s no chance of Mars and his co-writers eventually being added as co-writers to the “Flowers” credits? Not necessarily: Whether or not Cyrus is protected legally from legal recourse from the “Your Man” writers, she may ultimately decide to add them anyway as an act of goodwill and out of a desire to avoid further conflict, particularly with all the media attention the similarity between the songs has received. It’s not uncommon for additional songwriting credits to be added to a song after its initial release — as was the case with “Good 4 U” in 2021 — often following a period of negotiations between the concerned parties. But if the names of Mars and his co-writers stay absent in the credits, Cyrus is not likely to have any legal responsibility to give them their “Flowers” there.
Taylor Swift has reached an agreement with two songwriters to end a five-year long copyright lawsuit claiming she stole the lyrics to “Shake It Off” from an earlier song about “playas” and “haters,” resolving one of the music industry’s biggest legal battles without a climactic trial or ruling.
In a joint filing made on Monday in California federal court, attorneys for both Swift and her accusers – songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler – asked a judge for an order “dismissing this action in its entirety.” Before the deal, a trial had been scheduled to kick off in January.
The public filings did not include any specific terms of the apparent settlement, like whether any money exchanged or songwriting credits would be changed. Attorneys for both sides and a rep for Swift did not immediately return requests for comment.
The agreement means a sudden end for a blockbuster case that seemed headed toward the next landmark ruling on music copyrights. Following legal battles over Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the case against Swift posed fundamental questions about the limits of copyright protection, with her lawyers arguing that the accusers were trying to “cheat the public domain” by monopolizing basic lyrical phrases.
Hall and Butler first sued way back in 2017, claiming Swift stole her lyrics to “Shake It Off” from their “Playas Gon’ Play,” a song released by R&B group 3LW in 2001. That was no small accusation, given the song in question: “Shake It Off” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 2014 and ultimately spent 50 weeks on the chart, a mega-hit even for one of music’s biggest stars.
In Hall and Butler’s song, the line was “playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate”; in Swift’s track, she sings, “‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” In their complaint, the duo said Swift’s lyric was clearly copied from their song.
In the years since, Swift’s attorneys repeatedly pushed to dismiss the case, arguing that a short snippet of lyrics about “players” and “haters” was not creative or unique enough to be covered by copyrights. They cited more than a dozen earlier songs that had used similar phrases, including 1997’s “Playa Hater” by Notorious B.I.G and 1999’s “Don’t Hate the Player” by Ice-T.
Swift initially won a decision in 2018 dismissing the case on those grounds, with a federal judge ruling that Hall and Butler’s lyrics were not protected because popular culture in 2001 had had been “heavily steeped in the concepts of players, haters, and player haters.” But an appeals court later overruled that decision, and a judge ruled last year that the case would need to be decided by a jury trial.
“Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure,” the judge wrote at the time.
More recently, Swift’s team again asked the judge to dismiss the case, this time making a new argument: That documents turned over during the case had revealed that Hall and Butler voluntarily signed away their right to file the lawsuit in the first place.
In an August filing, Swift’s lawyers said the documents proved that Hall and Butler had granted their music publishers the exclusive rights to bring an infringement lawsuit over the song, meaning they lacked the legal standing to do so. Her lawyers said the pair had even emailed their publishers – Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group, respectively – asking for permission to sue, but that both companies had refused the request.
“After their music publishers refused to assign to plaintiffs the claim they assert in this action, their manager unsuccessfully lobbied a United States Congressman to get a House sub-committee to intervene,” Swift’s lawyers alleged in the filing.
That motion was still pending when Monday’s settlement was filed.
A new copyright lawsuit claims that Roddy Ricch stole elements of his chart-topping 2019 song “The Box” from a 1975 soul song that’s been repeatedly sampled – legally – by other rappers.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court filed against Ricch (real name Roderick Wayne Moore Jr.) and Atlantic Records, songwriter Greg Perry says the smash hit (which spent eleven weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100) clearly borrowed from his decades-old song “Come On Down.”
Perry’s lawyers say that an average music fan would be able to hear the “strikingly similar” tempo and melody of the two tracks simply by listening to it, but that more thorough investigation by music experts has more conclusively proven the theft.
“Comparative analysis of the beat, lyrics, hook, rhythmic structure, metrical placement, and narrative context by a musicology expert demonstrates clearly and convincingly that ‘The Box’ is an unauthorized duplication and infringement of certain elements of ‘Come On Down’.”
In specific terms, Perry claims that Ricch infringed the “ascending minor scale played by violin” that plays at the beginning of “Come On Down” and repeats six throughout the song. He says a very similar musical segment is featured in “The Box” and “permeates” the Ricch’s song, repeating 24 times.
According to Perry, “Come On Down” is a popular sample in hip hop – featured in both Yung Jeezy’s 2008 “Wordplay” and in Yo Gotti’s 2016 “I Remember.” But he says that both of those songs were fully cleared and licensed by giving him a songwriting credit and an ownership stake.
“Other [artists] in the rap world that have chosen to copy elements of ‘Come On Down’ have done so legally and correctly,” Perry’s lawyers wrote. “Defendants chose not to license the musical composition from plaintiffs and instead chose to intentionally infringe upon the copyright.”
Typically, a copyright accuser like Perry needs to show that Ricch and the other “Box” songwriters had so-called access to “Come On Down,” meaning they had a chance to copy the song in the first place. But Perry’s lawyers say his was “so popular in both the R&B and Rap Community” as a sample that such access is already “firmly established” at the outset of the case.
The lawsuit does not specify how much Perry is seeking in damages, but his lawyers claim he was given a 50% cut or greater on each of the earlier songs that sampled from “Come On Down,” which could potentially mean millions of dollars in royalties for a chart-topping song like “The Box.”
A rep for Ricch at Atlantic Records did not immediately return a request for comment.
Read the full complaint here:
A federal jury in Texas decided Thursday (Nov. 3) that an internet service provider must pay the three major record labels and others more than $46 million in damages over music illegally downloaded by the company’s subscribers.
After a month-long trial, jurors found that Grande Communications was legally liable for copyright infringement committed by its users — and that it owed separate damages for each of the more than 1,400 songs that were pirated on the company’s network.
The case is one of several such cases filed by music companies against ISPs, aimed at forcing them to take more proactive steps to eliminate piracy on their networks. In 2019, the labels won a shocking $1 billion verdict against Cox Communications in a similar case.
Grande’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday on the verdict. Mitch Glazier, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, called it “the latest validation by US courts and juries that unchecked online infringement will not stand.”
“The jury’s strong action here sends an important message to Internet Service Providers,” Glazier said. “Artists, songwriters, rightsholders, fans and legitimate services all depend upon a healthy digital music ecosystem that effectively protects creative works online.”
Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment teamed up to sue Grande in 2017, claiming the company had put itself on the hook by failing to take action against users who repeatedly pirated music.
“Defendants have been notified that their internet customers have engaged in more than one million infringements,” attorneys for the labels wrote at the time, but “have permitted repeat infringers to use the Grande service to continue to infringe plaintiffs’ copyrights without consequence.”
Internet service providers are typically not liable for individual infringements by their millions of users, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor.” But starting in the mid-2010s, music companies began arguing that ISPs had forfeited that immunity by ignoring the DMCA’s requirement that they terminate “repeat infringers” from their network.
Starting with a landmark case filed by BMG Rights Management against Cox, those arguments have repeatedly proved successful. Major labels have filed similar cases against Cox, Charter, RCN and other ISPs in courts around the country, winning huge verdicts like the $1 billion award against Cox (which is currently pending on appeal).
Facing such a lawsuit, Grande fired back that the music industry was wrongfully trying to turn ISPs into “copyright police.” Grande said such claims should really be targeted at the actual people who steal music, but that record labels had stopped pursuing them “due to bad publicity.” That was a reference to a series of controversial lawsuits filed in the 2000s, including one that ordered a Boston college student to pay $675,000 for pirating just 30 songs.
But the federal judge overseeing the case denied Grande’s motions and sent the case to trial, which kicked off last month. Following Thursday’s verdict, the company can appeal the ruling — first by asking the judge to overturn it, and then by taking the case to a federal appeals court.
Read the verdict form here:
Global music copyright generated $39.6 billion in 2021, up 18% from the previous year, according to the latest report by Will Page, industry analyst and former chief economist for Spotify. “The post-pandemic fallout has seen consumer subscriptions and ad-funded streaming continue to soar,” he wrote, “whereas business-to-business licensing by CMOs [collective management organizations] has only partially recovered.”
Streaming accounted for 55% of global copyright revenue, up from 52% in 2020. The industry’s shift to streaming has been dramatic: jJust five years ago, in 2017, streaming accounted for just 30% of global music copyright revenues.
Page brings together four sources of industry data for his analysis: IFPI’s annual Global Music Report, CISAC’s annual Global Collections Report, Music & Copyright’s analysis of music publishing and MIDiA Research’s estimate of royalty-free music licensing services such as Epidemic Sounds — a new addition to his study this year. He removes double counting in the reports, such as some mechanical royalties that are counted as revenue by both record labels and publishers.
Record labels’ revenue grew to $25.8 billion in 2021 from $21.3 billion in 2020 and $19.8 billion in 2019. In terms of market share, record labels improved their percentage of global revenue to 65.2% in 2021 from 63.4% in 2020 and 60.6% in 2019 — a sign of healthy consumer spending on subscription services such as Spotify and Apple Music.
On the flip side, publishers’ share of global revenue dropped to 34.1% in 2021, from 35.7% the year before. Still, as Page points out, this is more equitable than other points in history. In 2001, when labels’ revenues were peaking at the height of the CD sales boom, publishers received just 23% of revenues. In 2014, however, when label revenues had deteriorated, publishers were growing modestly and CMOs reported “record-breaking collections” up to 45% of global revenues. Record labels grew faster than publishers over the next seven years, however.
Record labels’ share of revenue increased due to “the recovery in consumer spend on music,” according to Page, “which traditionally favors labels over publishers.” The trend was amplified by the pandemic’s impact on business licensing – such as performance rights blanket licenses for retail, radio and concert venues – that favors publishers over labels.
Had the pandemic not occurred, performing rights income would have likely grown at 6% a year and would “arguably” be $1 billion greater today – a possible $9.4 billion rather than the actual $8.4 billion. On the other hand, wrote Page, “had the pandemic not happened, streaming may never have accelerated the way it did.”
Royalty-free music is a small part of the global music business but growing quickly thanks to the increasing need for easily licensed music on online platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. MIDiA Research put the value of royalty-free music – meaning the license is a one-time purchase without residual royalties – at $250 million in 2021.
The U.S. Copyright Office is quietly proposing a new rule to make sure that songwriters who invoke their termination rights actually get paid their streaming royalties, overturning a previous “erroneous” policy that could potentially have kept sending money to former owners in perpetuity.
Starting in 2020, groups like the Recording Academy raised alarm bells that a policy adopted by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the entity that collects and distributes streaming royalties) might lead to a bizarre outcome: Even after a writer takes back control of their songs, royalties might still flow to the old publishers that no longer own them — forever.
In a new rule proposed last month, the agency said the MLC’s policy was based on an “erroneous understanding and application of current law.” Ordering the group to “immediately repeal its policy in full,” the Copyright Office’s says that when a songwriter gets their rights back, they should obviously start getting the royalties, too.
“It is not clear why the statute or the case law should be read as making one particular copyright owner the permanent recipient [of royalties] because it happened to be the owner immediately before termination occurred,” the agency wrote in the proposed rule, issued Oct. 19.
The proposed rule change was quickly hailed as a win for songwriters. In a statement to Billboard, Michelle Lewis of the Songwriters of North America said the ambiguity over termination had “created stress and uncertainty for many songwriters.” Todd Dupler, vp for advocacy & public policy at the Recording Academy, says the rule change is “big news” for songwriters.
“We’re very grateful to the Copyright Office for stepping in to do this,” Dupler says. “We think the reasoning is very clear and I think they’ve reached the correct outcome.”
The MLC did not return a request for comment on the Copyright Office’s proposed rule.
Termination empowers an author to reclaim the rights to their copyrighted work decades after selling them away. In the music business, if a songwriter sold a publisher the rights to a song that later became a smash hit, termination allows them to automatically to get those rights back years later (the rule kicks in between 35 and 56 years later, depending on when the song was sold). Created by Congress when it updated federal copyright law in 1976, termination was designed to level the playing field for creators, who usually lack leverage in negotiations with big companies and are often forced to fork over rights before they know they’re valuable.
But termination comes with an important exception. Even though a publisher must hand back the rights to the original song, they’re entitled to keep selling any existing “derivative works” they created when they owned it. That means that even after a songwriter wins back ownership of their song, they can’t suddenly send cease-and-desists over a famous sample, or sue over a movie that featured the song under a synch license. Those continue to be fair game, and any fees under existing licenses keep flowing back to their old publisher.
That exception makes sense; it would be unfair to let a terminating songwriter suddenly revoke existing licenses that were legal when they were granted. But it also creates difficult ambiguity for the MLC and its so-called blanket license — the streamlined system created by Music Modernization Act in 2018 to make it easier for digital services to get mechanical royalties to the right songwriters.
Say a songwriter terminates their publisher’s control of their music. The writer is now the owner of those songs — that’s easy to figure out. But by paying the MLC for access to the blanket license, Spotify arguably already has an existing license in place with the old publisher. So, isn’t the copy of the song on Spotify an existing derivative work? And shouldn’t the royalties from it continue to go to the old publisher under that license?
Under the MLC’s termination dispute resolution policy issued in 2021, it appeared that was the case. The rules seemed to choose who to pay based on when a song was uploaded to a digital streamer’s servers; if it was uploaded prior to when a songwriter invoked their termination right, the royalties would keep going to the old owner — seemingly forever.
The MLC’s approach was not intended as a scheme to hurt songwriters. According to the Copyright Office’s filing, the MLC saw it as a “middle ground,” aimed at preventing drawn-out disputes that would lock up royalty payments “to the disadvantage of both songwriters and publishers.”
But for the Recording Academy’s Dupler, the ultimate outcome still seemed at odds with the spirit of the Music Modernization Act, which he says was designed to “help songwriters get compensated fairly for their work.”
“It raised concerns for us that this ambiguity was going to have a negative impact on songwriters,” says Dupler. “We feel pretty confident that it was never the intent of Congress that songwriters wouldn’t be receiving those royalties after termination.”
In the new rule issued last month, the Copyright Office agreed with that sentiment. In a detailed legal analysis, the agency explained that services like Spotify and Apple Music were not creating “derivative works” when they uploaded songs to their servers, meaning there was no caveats that should be imposed on a songwriter’s termination. And even if there were, the office made clear that it did not matter anyhow, stating simply: “a terminated publisher is not entitled to post-termination blanket license royalties.”
“The Office concludes that the MLC’s termination dispute policy is inconsistent with the law,” the agency wrote. “The statute entitles the current copyright owner to the royalties under the blanket license.”
Under the new rule, it won’t matter who owned a song when it was first uploaded to a digital service. Instead, it would “make clear that the copyright owner of the musical work as of the end of the monthly reporting period is the one who is entitled to the royalties.”
The text of the Copyright Office’s proposed rule is available in its entirety on the agency’s website. The rule is now open to public comments, in which interested parties can either support the changes or offer opposition. Such groups have until Nov. 25 to weigh in.
Miley Cyrus has settled a copyright lawsuit a month after she was sued for posting a paparazzi photo of herself to Instagram, according to court documents filed Wednesday (Oct. 18) and obtained by Billboard.
In the original complaint, filed on Sept. 12 in Los Angeles federal court, photographer Robert Barbera claimed that Cyrus reposted his 2020 image of her without a license or permission to do so. In the snap, the “Midnight Sky” singer is seen waving to fans as she exits a building.
In his complaint, Barbera claimed Cyrus has an “immense presence” due to her millions of followers on Instagram, and that posting the image “crippled if not destroyed” his ability to make money licensing it.
According to court documents, the lawsuit was subsequently dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning Barbera cannot refile the same claim again in that court.
The lawsuit against Cyrus is not the first Barbera has filed. The New York-based photographer previously filed copyright complaints against Ariana Grande in May 2019 and January 2020, and Justin Bieber in October 2019, though both cases were later settled on confidential terms. Earlier this summer, he filed another lawsuit against Dua Lipa that at the time of publication is still pending in court.
Though these cases may seem unfair, the law is on the side of photographers like Barbera, as they own the copyrights to the images that they take — and using those photos without a license constitutes infringement. Simply appearing in an image does not give a celebrity co-ownership of it, nor does it give them a right to repost it for free.
Had the court found that Cyrus had infringed Barbera’s copyright, the singer could have faced damages totaling as much as $150,000. For that reason, most celebrities accused of infringement by photographers opt to settle out of court, likely for a smaller sum, in order to avoid the time and expense that come with continued litigation. Though the terms of these settlement deals are nearly always private, for a single photo, amounts likely range in the tens of thousands of dollars.