Indian court refuses injunction of fantasy cricket league in unlicensed use of player names, likenesses

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In case about fantasy sports, the Delhi High Court in India ruled in late April that satire, news, and art must enjoy protection from right-of-publicity liability.

The case involves athlete likenesses in fantasy sport leagues. Plaintiffs are a Singapore-incorporated fantasy sport provider that invested big money to develop non-fungible token and other electronic products making licensed use of the names and likenesses of co-plaintiff cricket athletes. The defendant business operated a less fancy but "explosive[ly]" popular online fantasy league service using the players' name and likenesses without licenses.

The court determined that Indian law does recognize right of publicity, inspired in part by the example of statutory tort actions in the United States. Accordingly, "passing off" is essential to infringement, the court held, meaning that customers must reasonably understand the defendant's proffered product as bearing the subject's endorsement. 

The court denied preliminary injunction. In the instant case, evidence was lacking that the defendant made such a representation or that reasonable users made such a mistake. To the contrary, the defendant online disclaimed any affiliation with or license from the depicted players.

The court also recognized a constitutional dimension to the position of the defense in the case, opining that "use of celebrity names, images for the purposes of lampooning, satire, parodies, art, scholarship, music, academics, news and other similar uses would be permissible as facets of the right of freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India and would not fall foul to the tort of infringement of the right of publicity."

The case is Digital Collectibles Pte. v. Galactus Funware Technology Pte., 2023:DHC:2796, CS(COMM) 108/2023, 2023 LiveLaw (Del) 345 (Delhi High Ct. Apr. 26, 2023) (India), decided by Judge Amit Bansal, who holds an LL.M. from Northwestern University.

HT @ Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan.

German court protects political satire in 'fake interview'

Katrin Göring-Eckardt
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung CC BY-SA 2.0

In August 2022, a German court rejected a politician's claim that a satiric "fake interview" violated her rights.

Attorney Roman Brtka reported on the case for Bird & Bird Munich, and I rely on his report at Media Writes. The case is compelling because the fact scenario, and usually the same outcome, arises periodically in American law from the likes of an Onion "exclusive interview."

The plaintiff in the German case was Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the German Green Party. The defendant was Tichys Einblick (TE), a wide-ranging opinion magazine sometimes identified with right-wing populism. The content at issue was a wholly fictitious interview that mocked Göring-Eckardt's liberal position on pronouns. TE flagged the piece expressly headlined, "Achtung Satire" ("Attention Satire").

Brtka provided a helpful explanation of pronouns in the German language and how they play out in hot-button gender identity politics. The interview employed "extremely exaggerated ... gender-neutral language" to mock Göring-Eckardt.

The plaintiff invoked the German constitutional "right of personality," an outgrowth of broad European privacy law and close cousin of data protection. In this context, the right comes perhaps closest in American tort law to false light invasion of privacy. A better analogy would be a marriage of the right of personal autonomy, as known to medical decision-making in American constitutional law, to the interest of anti-disparagement, as known to trademark law.

The Hamburg regional court concluded, according to Brtka, "that the unbiased and reasonable audience could ... recognise, from the hyperbolic use of gender forms and the exaggerated demands mentioned in the article, that these were not actual statements made by the plaintiff. The mere fact that individual readers might come to a different understanding did not change this." Without any asserted truth, there could be no misrepresentation of the plaintiff's person, so no infringement of the plaintiff's personality right.

Brtka commented that "[i]t remains to be seen" whether the courts would protect satire that is not so plainly labeled, such that the satiric nature must be inferred from the content itself.

TE also reported the outcome of the case.

Unlike TE, The Onion, "America's Finest News Source," is satire through and through, even as it has been sold between media companies with other properties. The Onion's non-satirical supplement The AV Club was always branded distinctively and spun off in 2012. Taken in context, it's very difficult to mistake Onion content as true, though people sometimes infamously do. 

Like the German regional court, American courts, heeding the First Amendment, cut a wide berth for satire, likewise employing objective reasonableness to examine both content and context. Without an assertion susceptible of being proved true or false, there can be no winning claim of false light or defamation.

For satirists, closely related legal problems can arise from real interviews under pretenses the interviewee alleges were false: think Rudy Giuliani in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. The Borat films and media enterprises such as The Daily Show use releases to help protect themselves. Even a well worded release is not ironclad against a claim that acquiescence was procured through fraud. But whether upon the release or lack of falsity, claims are almost invariably dismissed. The practical problem for plaintiffs is that what the camera captures is true, and the judgment that frames it is merely opinion.

Evidencing American courts' deference to hyperbole, Fox News prevailed in a 2020 lawsuit in part upon the theory that reasonable viewers did not regard the recently newsworthy Tucker Carlson as a source of facts. In 2022, the Sixth Circuit denied recovery to a man who satirized the Facebook page of his local police, and then was charged with and acquitted of a crime. Police were entitled to qualified immunity from the man's civil rights claim, the court concluded. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review amid a set of engaging amicus briefs, including one from The Onion.

Since the E. Jean Carroll verdict against former President Donald Trump, there has been a flurry of commentary suggesting that defamation law is the way out of the misinformation quagmire. It's really not, for a bunch of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. Relevant here, the understandable thirst for accountability in the misinformation age might push against the traditionally wide berth of protection for satire. Let's hope the courts resist that push, because satire itself is a vital accountability mechanism.

Popular singer's 'right to be forgotten' outweighs free speech in Italian case over archival video and biting commentary

Because Manchester City FC might need it after today's derby match, let's consider the right to be forgotten.

As an aspect of European, and increasingly global, data protection law, "the right to be forgotten," or right to erasure, unsettles the tummies of American media advocates.  The right to erasure runs up against the presumptive rule of U.S. First Amendment law that there can be no punishment for the republication of truthful information lawfully obtained.  Read more about that here (predating implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation).  The Italian Court of Cassation has issued a potentially important decision at the intersection of the right to erasure and the freedom of expression.  

Hat tip @TheItalianLawJournal.  For a few months to come, or until a better translation comes to light, I'm parking a very rough Google Translate rendition of the ruling here in PDF.  The translations that follow here are mine, refining the Google Translate rendering. The original court decision can be found here.

Antonello Venditti by Angela_Anji (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The case stemmed from a TMZ-style confrontation by an RAI-1 "Live Life" («La vita in diretta») crew of Italian singer Antonello Venditti (Facebook) in 2000.  I've not seen the video, but Venditti apparently resisted the interrogators with sufficient gruffness that he earned his way onto the program's 2005 "ranking of the most obnoxious and grumpy characters in the entertainment world."  The story occasioned rebroadcast of the 2000 segment, along with commentary mocking his diminished fame in the intervening years.  Antonello took offense and sued, claiming "a right to be forgotten" attached to the 2000 video. 

Of peculiar resonance with current events in the United States, the Italian court took note of a German right-to-erasure case about "an affair in which a German citizen, who held a major political and business position in Germany, had requested the erasure of information from the web relating to an episode of collusion with Russian crime dating back several years earlier, republished several years after."  The Court of Justice of the EU ruled that "the public's interest in information prevailed over the individual's interest in oblivion."  However, the Italian court observed, the ruling resulted from a fact-intensive inquiry.

The court must engage with "the search for the right balance between the interest of Internet users in information and the fundamental rights of the person," the Italian court explained.  "Therefore, the editor of a newspaper that stores in its historical archive on the internet the news, making it available to a potentially unlimited number of people, is required to prevent, through the dissemination of even remote facts, without any meaningful and current public interest, possible harm to the right to be forgotten by the people who were involved."

The freedom of expression must yield to the right to erasure, the court held, upon analysis according to five factors:

1. the contribution made by the dissemination of the image or of the news to a matter of public interest;
2. the actual and current interest in the dissemination of the image or news (for reasons of justice, police, or protection of the rights and liberties of others, or for scientific, educational, or cultural purposes), to be considered absent in case of prevalence of a popular interest [italics added; in original, divulgativo: I'm not sure how to translate that and don't think "popular" or "informed" is right], or, worse, merely economic or commercial interest of the subject that spreads the news or the image; 
3. the high degree of notoriety of the subject represented, for the economic or political reality of the country;
4. the methods used, for the particular position held in public life, and, in particular, to obtain and give information, which must be truthful (because it is drawn from reliable sources, and with a diligent research work), disseminated in ways that are not excessive for information purposes, in the interest of the public, and free from insinuations or personal considerations, so as to highlight an exclusive objective interest in the new dissemination;
5. the preventive information about the publication or transmission of the news or image at a distance of time, in order to allow the interested party the right of reply before its disclosure to the general public.

Applying its multi-factor test, the court decided that RAI's interest in the rebroadcast video segment was outweighed by Antonello's privacy and data protection rights.  The court below had erred by finding Antonello's fame dispositive.  Reminding one of the analysis of Elmer Gertz in U.S. defamation lore, the court held that Antonello's large public following "certainly" did "not invest[ him] with a primary role in national public life."  Moreover, RAI's purpose, five years on, lacked merit. The court found it "undeniable that the reiterated broadcast ... had [the] unique purpose of allowing the inclusion of the singer ... in a ranking of ... 'the most obnoxious and grumpy of the entertainment world,' invented by the same broadcaster, allowing, in this way, the satisfaction of an interest that is exclusively informative [again, divulgativo], for commercial purposes, and for the television operator's audience."  The broadcaster's derogatory comments about Antonello's fame in 2005 aggravated the offense, the court added.  

The court also rejected "satire" as a defense.  The representation of Antonello was not "paradoxical, surreal and hyperbolic critique," but referred to "true fact," "clearly directed to a mere and unjustified denigration of the artist."  The broadcaster sought to use the 2000 video to represent Antonello in 2005 as "a singer, for years, in decline."

This case is the very stuff of American media advocates' nightmares.  Newspapers decry the right to erasure as a threat to online archives—though representations in archives, as archives, are readily factually distinguishable from the Antonello case.  The more realistic threat would be to the "TMZ"/"Talk Soup" format of entertainment media, or even the clever uses of archival video that have become the staple of commentary on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and Last Week with John Oliver.  Certainly under a rule such as the Italian court employed, broadcasters, even straight news broadcasters, would have to take more care with their use of B roll.  

I've advocated in favor of evolving U.S. privacy law toward European data protection norms.  But the Italian court went too far here, lending credence to American nay-saying.  I fault the court's analysis of Antonello as, in U.S. terms, a "private figure."  The lower court got it right in finding Antonello's public status dispositive relative to this RAI commentary.  It's especially telling and troubling that as to the satire argument—the RAI program seems on the mild side of the Talk Soup genre—the court faulted RAI commenters for the truth in their observation of Antonello's waning fame.  The court set up the Italian judiciary to be a "super editor" of popular media, an arbiter of taste.  American courts appropriately struggle with newsworthiness determinations in privacy law because they do not want that job.