Take Two sued over NBA player tattoos

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/story/_/i ... permission

A company that owns the right to tattoos on NBA players is suing Take-Two Interactive and Visual Concepts, makers of the popular video-game franchise "NBA2K," for graphically representing those tattoos on NBA players without its permission.

Solid Oak Sketches filed suit on Monday in New York federal court, saying that particular tattoos depicted on players in the recent game NBA2K16 was the company's copyrighted work.

The eight infringed-on designs include a child's portrait and script scrolls with clouds and doves on LeBron James' forearms and butterflies on Kobe Bryant's arm.

Solid Oak Sketches got the copyrights to most of the tattoos last year and, as evidenced by exhibits submitted in the lawsuit, had written letters to the video game company to make an arrangement so that the tattoos could be used in the game. Solid Oak offered to Take-Two a license to the tattoos for $1.1 million.

"It's clear that they knew that this was something that was to be negotiated," said Darren Heitner, whose firm, Heitner Legal, is co-representing the plaintiff.

Calls placed to representatives for Take-Two Interactive were not immediately returned.

This is not the first time a tattoo artist has sued a video-game maker for using his work on an athlete without permission. Tattoo artist Victor Escobedo was awarded $22,500 for his lion tattoo that was portrayed on UFC fighter Carlos Condit without his permission in THQ's "UFC Undisputed" game. Escobedo had originally asked for $4.1 million.

A little surprised it hasn't happened before now, given the amount of NBA players with tattoos.

That's pretty cool. Didn't 2k leave off CM Punk's Pepsi logo as well? The Pepsi logo looks like it's altered for the upcoming UFC game.

Yeah, a couple of his tattoos (including the Pepsi logo) have had to be omitted/altered in games.