IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Miley Cyrus sued for posting Instagram photo of herself, (Sep 13, 2022)

By Cheryl Beise, J.D.

A New York photographer claims that the star did not have permission to post to her Instagram account a photograph he took of her.

Pop star Miley Ray Cyrus committed willful copyright infringement by posting a photograph of her taken by New York photographer Robert Barbara, according to a complaint filed this week in the federal district court of Los Angeles (Barbera v. Cyrus, September 9, 2022, Blumenfeld, S.).

According to the complaint, on February 13, 2020, photojournalist Robert Barbara took a photograph of Miley Ray Cyrus waving to onlookers as she exited a building (“the Photo”). The photographer states that he licenses rights to his images to online and print publications. The photographer obtained a copyright registration for the Photo on April 11, 2020. The photographer alleges that on May 10, 2020, he first observed an exact copy of the Photo on a social media account with the name of “mileycyrus” on Instagram (the “Account”) in a post dated February 13, 2020.

The photographer claims that defendant Miley Cyrus “uses the Account to promote her brand as well as her financial interests including her musical works and associated business ventures.” The Account has over 169 million followers. “The Infringement includes a URL (“Uniform Resource Locator”) for a fixed tangible medium of expression that was sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be communicated for a period of more than a transitory duration and therefore constitutes a specific infringement,” the complaint states. Such widespread, unauthorized dissemination of the Photo has “crippled if not destroyed the potentiality of any marked” for the Photo, according to the complaint. The photographer also believes that the defendant’s infringement has increased traffic to her Account, resulting in increased revenues “generated via the sale of the defendant’s musical works or via her various associated business partnerships and/or ventures.”

The complaint asserts that the defendant willfully and illegally copied, stored, reproduced, distributed, adapted, and/or publicly displayed the Plaintiff’s copyright work. For such willful copyright infringement, the photographer is seeking an award of actual damages and disgorgement of the defendant's profits attributable to the infringement under Section 504 of the Copyright Act, injunctive relief, and an award of costs and attorney fees under Section 505 of the Copyright Act.

The Case is No. 2:22-cv-06449-SB-JPR.

Attorneys: Craig B. Sanders (Sanders Law Group) for Robert Barbera.

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