Remember when Rihanna sued Topshop’s parent company, Arcadia Group Brands Ltd, for $5 million for using her image on some of their products without permission between 2011 – 2012? Hilariously, she later asked for free stuff from the company, apparently, but that’s neither here nor there. The latest is that she won the lawsuit – hurray!
From Digital Spy:
Topshop’s lawyers had claimed the 25-year-old was making an unjustifiable bid to establish a “free-standing image right” over use of her picture in the UK.
In a hearing at London’s High Court today (July 31), Mr Justice Birss ruled that while there is “no such thing as a general right by a famous person to control the reproduction of their image” and “the mere sale by a trader of a T-shirt bearing an image of a famous person is not an act of passing off”, he considered Topshop to be at fault in this case.
No word on how much money she got for the inconvenience or whether they had to pony up the full $5 mil. That’ll teach you to use someone’s image without her permission, I guess.