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Business News Legal
More legal action over Rihanna’s S&M video
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 18 February 2014
Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ video is generating nearly as much legal action as a Lil Wayne album. The promo for the 2011 hit has led to claims from two photographers that it rips off their work.
The first claimant was celebrity photo man David LaChapelle, while German photographer Philipp Paulus made his allegations of image theft against the video in June 2011. And it’s Paulus who is now going legal, claiming that Rihanna’s label Universal Music has failed to properly respond to his complaint.
The main moment in Rihanna’s video that has angered Paulus is the bit where the singer wears a big dress and stands up against a plastic sheet surrounded by Xs, which does ape one of the photo man’s earlier photographs. It seems likely the pop promo’s director, Melina Matsoukas, was influenced by Paulus’s output and, according to his legal reps, Universal has admitted the similarities that exist between the video and the photographer’s work.
The disagreement, though, is whether Matsoukas and Rihanna recreating the scene of one of Paulus’s photographs is a mere tribute to his art, or copyright infringement. The photographer and his lawyers reckon the latter, but have failed to reach an agreement with the major so have now gone legal in his home country.
Says Paulus: “It is shocking that a company like Universal Music, which generates its turnover with intellectual property, copies the intellectual property [of others] completely unauthorised and without respect”.
