{"id":5922,"date":"2025-05-19T18:08:53","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T18:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/lil-nas-x-lawsuit-over-instagram-photo-poses-dismissed-by-court\/"},"modified":"2025-05-19T18:08:53","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T18:08:53","slug":"lil-nas-x-lawsuit-over-instagram-photo-poses-dismissed-by-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/lil-nas-x-lawsuit-over-instagram-photo-poses-dismissed-by-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Lil Nas X Lawsuit Over Instagram Photo Poses Dismissed By Court"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tL<\/span>il Nas X can\u2019t be sued by an Instagram user who claimed the superstar stole his distinctive \u201cposes\u201d and used them in his own posts, federal appeals court says \u2013 ruling that the dispute images \u201cshare few similarities\u201d and Lil Nas likely never saw them anyway.<\/p>\n

\n\tRodney Woodland<\/strong>, a freelance artist and model, claimed in his 2022 lawsuit that the \u201cOld Town Road\u201d rapper (Montero Lamar Hill<\/strong>) had illegally replicated several provocative photos in which Woodland struck elaborate poses while partially nude.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a ruling Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit says that the dueling sets of Instagram posts share only a few scattered similarities that didn\u2019t legally add up to copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHill\u2019s photograph shares almost nothing in common with Woodland\u2019s,\u201d Judge Kenneth K. Lee<\/strong> writes, analyzing two of the images. \u201cThe photos both depict a Black man folded in on himself, but the similarities stop there. The objective elements in the photos\u2014the men\u2019s poses, colors, lighting, backgrounds, etc.\u2014are different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe appeals court also rejects Woodland\u2019s lawsuit for an even simpler reason: That Lil Nas had likely never seen the images he was accused of copying. That issue \u2013 known as \u201caccess\u201d in copyright law \u2013 is a crucial component in any infringement lawsuit.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is not enough to simply allege that [Lil Nas] is an active user of Instagram and thus had a reasonable possibility of viewing Woodland\u2019s photos,\u201d Lee writes for a three-judge panel. \u201cThere are over a billion users and many more posts on Instagram. The mere fact that Hill uses Instagram and that Woodland\u2019s photos are on Instagram raises no more than a bare possibility that Hill viewed Woodland\u2019s photos.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAttorneys for both sides did not return requests for comment on the ruling on Monday.<\/p>\n

\n\tWoodland sued Lil Nas in June 2022, claiming the rapper had ripped off 11 of his copyrighted photographs, illegally copying \u201coriginal and unique elements\u201d of them including \u201cposes, colors, lighting and coloring.\u201d The images all feature Woodland and Nas naked with their genitals obscured, either by their pose or the use of editing elements.<\/p>\n

\n\tA federal judge dismissed the case in 2023, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed that ruling on Friday. In its written opinion, the appeals court included side-by-sides of each disputed pair of photos and detailed why each of Nas\u2019 posts were not improper.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe commonalities go no further than the depiction of a man reclining on his side with certain body parts strategically covered \u2014 a common pose in photos of male models and actors,\u201d the court wrote about one set of images.<\/p>\n

\n\tSeveral of the disputed photos featured both Woodland and Nas \u201cdraped in chains.\u201d The court said that was a clear similarity, but not one that trigger\u2019s copyright law\u2019s protections for creative expression.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe idea in each of the photos is the same \u2014 the provocative image of a Black man in chains,\u201d the court wrote. \u201cBut that idea is not protected \u2014 indeed, it is a common motif in many pieces of art. Only the expression through the selection and arrangement of objective elements receives copyright protection.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFriday\u2019s ruling carries added importance because it is a so-called precedential ruling, offering new case law on the issue of copyright \u201caccess\u201d in the era of social media. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe court said the rules had involved in an analog world and that Instagram and other platforms had made it \u201ceasier than ever\u201d for copyright works to be widely disseminated. But the court also warned that accusers would still need to prove that an alleged infringer had a good chance of seeing their work \u2014 and that none of Woodland\u2019s posts had recieved more than 75 \u201clikes\u201d on Instagram.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSocial media and other digital-sharing platforms could make it easier for plaintiffs to show that defendants had access to their materials \u2014but only if they can show that the defendants had a reasonable chance of seeing their work under that platform\u2019s algorithm or content-sharing policy,\u201d the appeals court wrote. \u201cThat is a big \u201cif\u201d\u2014 and, as explained below, Woodland has fallen short here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lil Nas X can\u2019t be sued by an Instagram user who claimed the superstar stole his distinctive \u201cposes\u201d and used them in his own posts, federal appeals court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[143,2059,4585,303,1916,6012,3855,6013],"class_list":["post-5922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-court","tag-dismissed","tag-instagram","tag-lawsuit","tag-lil","tag-nas","tag-photo","tag-poses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}