International Women’s Day is ahead, and a replica of the New York Fearless Girl statue was installed this week in Melbourne. It was unveiled by the artist who created the original statue, Kristen Visbal.
The investment management company which commissioned Visbal to create the original statue, State Street Global Advisors Trust Company (SSGA), is now suing her in the Supreme Court of the State of New York for breach of their copyright and trademark license agreements, which are confidential. SSGA claims that Visbal breached the agreement by selling unauthorized replicas of the statue in Australia and in Oslo, and also by bringing a replica to the 2019 Women’s March in Los Angeles.
Fearless Girl in Wall Street
SSGA commissioned the creation and installation of the Fearless Girl Statue on the International Woman’s Day in 2017 to celebrate the first anniversary of its gender diversity index designed to measure how gender diverse are large U.S. companies. The statue originally faced the Bull statue in the downtown Manhattan. It is now placed in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
SSGA alleges that Visbal’s contractual obligations under the agreements required her to seek SSGA’s authorization before selling the statue or using it for promotional events.
SSGA claims that Visbal has breached her covenant of good faith and fair dealing implied in every contract under New York law.
It further claims that Visbal breached the terms of the confidential trademark license agreement by “failing to maintain the well-regarded reputation and integrity of Fearless Girl” and thus weakening the goodwill created by the Fearless Girl brand and campaign.
SSGA also claims that Visbal breached the terms of the confidential copyright license agreement by selling the replicas without SSGA’s authorization.
SSGA is asking the court to award damages, including exemplary damages, to the company.
As the terms of the agreements are not known to us, we do not even know which party is the owner of the copyright. Indeed, the copyright owner of a work made for hire is the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them.
The copyright of a joint work, a work created by two or more authors, with the intent that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of the work, is owned by all the authors. It is not necessary that the contributions of each author are equal, but each of the contributions must be independently copyrightable.
We know, however, that SSGA is the owner of the Fearless Girl trademark.
A few words on copyright licensing
- You can only license what you own.
- If you are a joint owner of a copyright, you can grant a non-exclusive license without the consent of the other owner, unless all the joint owners agree differently in writing.
- Remember that your copyright may be licensed to become someone else’s trademark. In that case, using it without permission of the licensee may be both copyright and trademark infringement.
Picture is courtesy of Flickr user Billie Grace Ward under a CC BY 2.0 license.
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