Attention Kim Kardashian: You Can't Sue Another Woman For Having A Big Ass And An Instagram Account

Legal Issues

from the butt-why? dept

Let’s pretend for a moment that for-some-reason-a-celebrity Kim Kardashian reads Techdirt. Someone needs to let her know that lawsuits and lawyers are not for temper tantrums over threats to your own celebrity. I’d have thought she’d have previously learned this lesson after Old Navy staved off the lawsuit she filed because the clothing company had the gall to hire a brunette woman for one of their commercials. It would appear not, now that she’s reportedly investigating whether or not she can sue a woman named Jen Selter for “copying” Kim’s poses (bwah?) and having a big ass.

Selter has been posting photographs of her large buttocks on Instagram, an activity Kardashian apparently feels is an unacceptable infringement upon her very raison d’etre: one of the gangplanks of Kim Kardashian’s global celebrity being her nonpareil ability to take photographs of her own large buttocks with a cameraphone. “Kim thinks Jen copies all her poses … she is fuming as she feels her curvy bum is one of her most unique selling points and feels that Jen is just trying to cash in.”

After, ahem, extensive research, I can assure you that there is very little in these poses that is either unique or identifiable as being Kardashian-esque, beyond the camera’s fixation on the subject’s posterior. This isn’t a “Blue Steel” Zoolander thing, it’s a series of pictures that feature an attractive woman with a particular physical asset. What appears to be upsetting Kardashian, according to the post, is that Selter has been winning modeling and endorsement gigs.

“Insiders say Kim has sought legal advice to see if they can stop Jen,” it read, raising the very real possibility that, somewhere in California, a crack team of lawyers may at this very moment be working around the clock to copyright buttocks on behalf of Kim Kardashian.

It likely wouldn’t be copyright that would come into play, but possibly some combination of publicity rights and/or trademark (trying to think like a really bad lawyer would is not that easy). But so what? It isn’t a violation of trademark or publicity rights to simply naturally look in some way similar to another person, and there is absolutely no attempt in these pictures at a depiction of anything to do with any Kardashian anywhere. This reeks of the Old Navy case all over again, except the “look alike” looks even less “alike,” and you can expect any legal action from Kardashian to be similarly fruitless.

Filed Under: copying, copyright, jen selter, kim kardashian, lawsuits, poses, publicity rights, trademark