Is Harry Styles, 19 and classed as the “womanizer” of the band, but infact has only had about 2-3 confirmed "relationships"īut as we know, some of us know him as the gay member with other boyband member, Louis Tomlinson. “People sue frivolously all the time, but do I think he would lose if he sued? Absolutely.Also I know at the end it’s abit of Narry but you need to get my point across!
“I’m sure it was on their radar and they probably felt pretty confident that they had a good First Amendment protection,” he says, noting that book publishers and media organizations have legal departments that clear such matters after careful analysis.Īnd, as Caplan points out, HBO didn’t have a legal obligation to contact Tomlinson because the scene was not defamatory and didn’t violate the singers’ right of publicity. He suspects that the legal team at HBO took time to vet the question and concluded that the scene did not require them to get a release from the singers, and that it would not present a legal problem. “The show has other commercial appeal and they probably wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop this.” “People didn’t just tune in to see this one clip,” he says Scoolidge also has no first-hand knowledge and was speaking in general legal terms. Peter Scoolidge, an intellectual property attorney at Scoolidge, Peters, Russotti & Fox, LLP, concurs with Caplan’s assessment, explaining that an artist has a right of publicity that allows them to control the use of their likeness and prevent someone else from profiting from using their image for profit. Kelly begged actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta to “come out of the closet.” He notes that South Park engages in this type of parody all the time, including a 2005 episode, “ Trapped in the Closet,” during which an animated R. “To be defamatory it must be a statement of fact, such as ‘this person has broken the law repeatedly,’ but this is not a statement of fact, it’s a depiction.” “The fact is the person is having a fantasy in the show, so nobody would take what appears on the screen to be a statement of fact,” he says. More importantly, he says, the scene is clearly a parody. Specifically, he says, a number of states have found that claiming that someone is gay is no longer considered to be defamatory, though the statutes still differ on a state-by-state basis.
“The only types of claims would be over right of publicity or defamation claims.”Ĭaplan explains that in terms of right of publicity, the images are not being used for commercial purposes - even if they appear on a pay-cable channel series - adding that there are a “number of defenses” that would make a defamation claim fail.
“First of all, this is a First Amendment-protected work,” Brian Caplan, an intellectual property lawyer at the New York firm Reitler Kailas & Rosenblatt LLC tells Billboard about his assesment of the legal protections afforded this kind of parody. Caplan, who has represented the Lumineers and the estates of James Brown and George Gershwin, was speaking as a legal expert, with no first-hand knowledge of the HBO series’ internal legal deliberations. Louis Tomlinson Says He Was 'Not Contacted' Over Explicit Harry Styles Scene in 'Euphoria'