Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Fox Settles 'American Horror Story' Legal Spat Over 'Zombie Boy' Tattoo



Rick Genest, a model who appeared in a Lady Gaga video, claimed his copyrighted body art was stolen on the hit FX series.

Twentieth Century Fox Television, producer of FX's American Horror Story, has settled an under-the-radar copyright fight with a model whose tattoo artwork was allegedly stolen for a key scene in the Emmy-winning series.

Sources say lawyers for Fox and Genest have been working out a settlement to avoid a lawsuit ever since. Horror Story has aired in dozens of countries, potentially exposing Fox to hundreds of thousands of dollars in copyright infringement damages, and erasing or obscuring the Zombie Boy body art in future airings of the episode would have been extremely costly. At the same time, a court could also have found the two pieces of body art dissimilar or ruled that the Horror Story scene was a protected fair use.

But now the two sides have now come to an agreement to end the dispute. Terms are not being released.

Fox declined to comment.

If the case sounds familiar, that's because it echoes claims brought last spring by a Missouri tattoo artist who created boxer Mike Tyson's distinctive facial mark against Warner Bros. over a similar tattoo on a character in the studio's The Hangover Part II. That case settled after a judge denied an effort to halt the film's release but called the studio's legal defenses "silly." The dispute generated national headlines and questions about whether body art and tattoos should be subject to copyright protection.

Genest was represented in the case by attorney Richard Dermer of RAM Management, as well as Dorothy Weber at Shukat Arrow Hafer Weber and Herbsman in New York and Mathieu Bouchard at Irving Mitchell Kalichman in Montreal.

Read More: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/foxs-american-horror-story-zombie-379219


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