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The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame wants a federal judge to toss out a copyright lawsuit over an image of Eddie Van Halen, arguing that it made legal fair use of the image by using it as part of a museum exhibit designed to “educate the public about the history of rock and roll music.”
The lawsuit, filed last year, claims the Rock Hall never paid to license Neil Zlozower’s image — a black-and-white photo of late-’70s Van Halen in the recording studio — before blowing it up into an eight-foot-tall display in the Cleveland museum.

But in a motion to dismiss the case filed Tuesday (Jan. 21), the Rock Hall says it didn’t need to. Attorneys for the museum say the offending exhibit was protected by “fair use”, a rule that allows copyrighted works to be reused legally in many contexts, including education and commentary.

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“RRHOF transformed plaintiff’s original band photograph by using it as a historical artifact to underscore the importance of Eddie Van Halen’s musical instruments,” the Hall’s attorneys write. “RRHOF operates a museum, and it displayed the image in service of its charitable mission to educate the public about the history of rock and roll music.”

Zlozower filed his case in October, claiming the Hall made an “exact copy of a critical portion of plaintiff’s original image” for the exhibit, which he claimed “did not include any photo credit or mentions as to the source of the image.”

The Rock Hall is just the latest company to face such a lawsuit from Zlozower, who also snapped images of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen over a decades-long career. Since 2016, court records show he’s filed nearly 60 copyright cases against a range of defendants over images of Elvis Costello, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe and more.

In the current dispute, the Van Halen image was used in two exhibits: “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll” and “Legends.” Focused on musical instruments used by famed rockers, the exhibits featured sections showing Van Halen’s guitars, amplifiers and other gear. In the display, the original photo of the band was cropped to show just Eddie holding one of the guitars, which was placed amid the exhibit’s objects and informational placards.

In their motion to dismiss the case, the Rock Hall’s attorneys say the museum made a “transformative use” of Zlozower’s original image — a key question when courts decide fair use. They say the Hall used it not simply as an image of the band, but “to contextualize Eddie Van Halen’s instruments on display in the museum as historical artifacts.”

“RRHOF incorporated a portion of plaintiff’s photograph displayed next to the exhibition object, as one piece of source material to document and represent the use of the guitar,” the museum’s lawyers write. “This proximal association between source material and exhibition object helps visitors connect information and delve more deeply into the exhibition objects.”

In making that argument, the Hall’s attorneys had a handy piece of legal precedent to cite: A 2021 ruling by a federal appeals court tossed out a copyright lawsuit against New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art over the use of another image of Van Halen in a different exhibit on the same famous set of guitars.

In making that ruling, the appeals court said the Met had clearly made “transformative” fair use of the image by displaying it alongside the exhibit: “Whereas [the photographer]’s stated purpose in creating the photo was to show ‘what Van Halen looks like in performance,’ the Met exhibition highlights the unique design of the Frankenstein guitar and its significance in the development of rock n’ roll instruments,” the appeals court wrote at the time.

That earlier ruling is not technically binding on the case against the Rock Hall, which takes place in another region of the federal court system. But such an uncannily on-point ruling could certainly be influential on the judge overseeing the current case.

An attorney for Zlozower did not immediately return a request for comment.